Two Thumbs Up: How Critics Aid Appreciation 9780226705033

Citation preview

T wo Thumb s up

Two Thumbs Up how CriTiC s Aid AppreCi AT ion

Stephanie Ross

The University of Chicago Press

C h iC Ag o And London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2020 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637. Published 2020 Printed in the United States of America 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20

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isbn-13: 978-0-226-06428-4 (cloth) isbn-13: 978-0-226-70503-3 (e-book) doi: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226705033.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Ross, Stephanie, author. Title: Two thumbs up : how critics aid appreciation / Stephanie Ross. Description: Chicago : University of Chicago, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCn 2019053421 | isbn 9780226064284 (cloth) | isbn 9780226705033 (ebook) Subjects: LCsh: Hume, David, 1711–1776. | Art appreciation. | Aesthetics. | Art—Philosophy. | Art criticism. Classification: LCC N75 .R67 2020 | ddC 701/.18—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019053421 ♾ This paper meets the requirements of Ansi/niso Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

Preface vii Introduction 1 1 · Taste and Preference 8 2 · Aesthetic Qualities 29 3 · Hume on the Standard of Taste 61 4 · Identifying Critics 83 5 · When Critics Disagree 107 6 · Comparing and Sharing Taste 134 7 · Some Applications 159 Appendix: A Checklist for Appreciation 203 Acknowledgments 205 Notes 207 Bibliography 239 Index 245

Preface

My first book, What Gardens Mean (University of Chicago Press, 1998), was an exercise in landscape aesthetics. It allowed me to happily think about gardens’ powers and their status as art. It was also one of those rare philosophical projects that required its author to travel. For quite some time thereafter, I cast about for a suitable follow-up. The project I eventually chose is summarized by my subtitle, “How Critics Aid Appreciation.” I found myself drawn to an interconnected set of issues that emerged as I repeatedly taught and pondered two key essays: “Aesthetic Concepts,” published by Frank Sibley in 1959; and “Of the Standard of Taste,” published by David Hume some two hundred years earlier. Between them these pieces raise compelling questions about how we engage with works of art and about whether some individuals are specially situated to serve as guides. Concerns about aesthetic realism and the objectivity of aesthetic claims are ever-present in the background. My aim has been to write for a broad audience in addressing these questions—not just professional philosophers and philosophy students, but also humanists, generalists, art enthusiasts, autodidacts, and more. I examine a rich set of issues here. Since readers might want to pick and choose, pursuing some of the topics I take up but skipping others, I have prefaced each chapter with a précis that indicates its content. I have also created a brief appendix with a suggested checklist for appreciation. Examining it will allow readers to consider their own critical practice.

Introduction

Consider the careers of film critics Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert. Starting with the 1975 debut of Opening Soon at a Theater Near You on their local Chicago PBS affiliate, they held forth until Siskel’s death in 1999, rating films and entertaining an ever-growing audience with their opinionated analysis and captivating banter. They transitioned from print to electronic media (both began as film critics for Chicago daily papers) and presided over increasingly ambitious iterations of that first local show.1 At the height of their popularity, Siskel and Ebert were said to reach 95 percent of the nation with their reviews.2 Their personal relationship was competitive and rancorous. A 2013 retrospective published in Slate magazine compares their interactions to “a peevish marriage” and notes that tapings of the half-hour show would often take four to six hours because the two stars argued so vociferously about every little thing.3 I take away two important morals from this brief history. First, Siskel and Ebert’s long reign shows that arguing about art is both entertaining and engrossing. And second, they perfected a way to give aesthetic advice to a mass audience. There was a predictable structure to Siskel and Ebert’s programs. Generally several films were reviewed. The critics took turns leading the discussions. They called attention to details of character and plot, discussed nuances of acting, noted tone and mood, unpacked special effects. They also offered illuminating comparisons, ranking the current film against other work by the same artists and similar work by others. Short clips were shown throughout to support these various claims. As Siskel and Ebert’s high ratings attest, this formula made for a very popular show. Viewers get a good sense of each of the films being rated. The fact that each segment offers evaluative claims about a film together

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with supporting evidence makes for a more in- depth experience than the typical movie trailer. Viewers enjoy a vicarious taste of each film, but they are also invited to engage their own critical machinery and form initial other-things-equal preferences. They are aided in this task by the give and take between the two critics. When Siskel and Ebert disagree, viewers can choose sides and decide which critic should hold sway. When Siskel and Ebert concur, viewers can appreciate the weight of accumulated evidence. The critics’ summary thumbs up/thumbs down verdicts provides useful counsel to movie-goers seeking help with their entertainment choices. In the days before the full flourishing of Rotten Tomatoes, Netflix Reviews, MRQE (Movie Review Query Engine), and individual blogposts too numerous to count, Siskel and Ebert’s columns and on-air performances provided both entertainment and truly practical criticism. To appreciate the ubiquity of exchanges like those between Siskel and Ebert, consider the following dialogue from the hit CBS television series The Big Bang Theory. The four friends, all geeky graduate students at Cal Tech, are debating the merits of various movies: Sheldon: “Oh look, Saturn 3 is on.” Raj: “I don’t want to watch Saturn 3, Deep Space 9 is better.” Sheldon: “How is Deep Space 9 better than Saturn 3?” Raj: “Simple subtraction will tell you it’s 6 better.” Leonard: “Compromise. Watch Babylon 5.” Later in the episode, the characters engage in a slightly more substantive bit of aesthetic disputation. This occurs after their friend Howard calls from the lab to inform them that he’s gotten the Mars Rover stuck in a ditch. Their discussion of crisis terminology, in keeping with the snippet of dialogue above, soon segues into bona fide arts analysis. Leonard: “Howard’s at the Mars Rover Lab, he says he’s in trouble, DEFCON 5.” Sheldon: “DEFCON 5, well, there’s no need to rush.” Leonard: “What?” Sheldon: “DEFCON 5 means no danger, DEFCON 1 is a crisis.” Leonard: “How can 5 not be worse than 1?” Raj: “Yeah, Star Trek 5 is worse than 1.” Sheldon: “First of all, that’s a comparison of quality, not intensity. Secondly, Star Trek 1 is orders of magnitude worse than Star Trek 5.”

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Raj: “Are you joking? Star Trek 5 is the standard against which all badness is measured.” Sheldon: “Star Trek 5 has specific failures in writing and direction, while Star Trek 1 fails across the board: art direction, costuming, music, sound editing.”4 The first dispute, focused on nothing more than the numbers in the movie titles, satirizes the entire critical enterprise. But the second exchange concludes by citing just the sorts of considerations that carry weight in genuine critical disputes. I offer these bits of dialogue to indicate the extent to which argument about art has trickled down to permeate popular culture. These comedic snippets, together with the shows Siskel and Ebert aired over the years, foreground the two issues I propose to explore in this book: the nature of aesthetic appreciation and the workings of critical advice. My pursuit of these matters will draw on rich resources from recent and contemporary philosophy. I will use Frank Sibley’s account of aesthetic qualities and David Hume’s characterization of ideal critics as templates for my investigation.5 I will also address the concerns raised by Jerrold Levinson in his astute pair of papers on Humean ideal critics.6 My goal is to set out and defend a neo-Humean theory that can provide answers to the following questions. How should we engage with works of art? What might enhance such encounters? Should some people’s views be privileged? Who should count as a critic? How do critics aid appreciation? What is the extent of critical disagreement? What follows about realism in aesthetics? I will touch on various other topics along the way, including gustatory taste, differences among the arts, bad art, empirical research on aesthetic preference, and the leveling effects of the internet. To begin this exploration, let me offer tentative definitions of two key concepts. The first is appreciation. I understand this in the broad sense proposed by Ted Cohen in his paper “Jokes.” 7 Cohen there sets out a threepart analogy, comparing arguments, jokes, and works of art. Each, he suggests, has its proper uptake: namely, persuasion, amusement, and appreciation. That is, successful arguments compel belief; successful jokes trigger laughter; successful works of art beget a distinctive sort of experience, one that is rewarding though not always pleasurable. Proper appreciation is responsive to a work’s constitutive properties and generally involves some understanding of what the artist was attempting as well as of what he or she in fact accomplished.

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The second concept in need of clarification is that of criticism. In his recent book On Criticism, Noël Carroll proposes that critics are in the business of offering reasoned evaluations of works of art.8 This is meant to counter the claim that the main task of criticism is interpretation—that critics should indicate the meaning of works but stop short of providing overall evaluations. Carroll’s full analysis of the critical enterprise has critics engaging in six activities— description, classification, contextualization, elucidation, interpretation, and analysis— en route to delivering (and defending) that final summary evaluation.9 Carroll draws a distinction elsewhere between two types of critics, consumer reporters and taste makers. Consumer reporters “try to predict which [works] most of their readership will love and which they will hate,” while taste makers instead “try to shape [and, presumably, expand] the taste of their readers.” 10 Peter Lamarque acknowledges a related distinction when he contrasts academic with journalistic critics in his book The Philosophy of Literature.11 What Lamarque has in mind here is the difference between offering accounts of established works—the task of academic critics—versus assessing new ones—the task of journalistic critics. The latter assignment can be especially challenging since new works must be vetted without aid from the test of time. The distinctions proposed by Carroll and Lamarque flag differences in the ways criticism is put to use. Consulting criticism in advance to help us allot scarce time and attention might seem the paradigm case. But we also look to criticism after the fact to refine and deepen our understanding of works we’ve already encountered. A related divide separates criticism that informs us about individual works from pieces that theorize about artistic wholes—a literary genre, an artistic movement, an artist’s oeuvre. Contrast online reviews, blog posts, and newspaper critiques with the landmark books by Charles Rosen on the classical style, Ernst Gombrich on realistic representation, Northrop Frye on the structure of fiction. More narrowly focused studies are also in the mix, for example, Helen Vendler on the poetry of Yeats, Stephen Greenblatt on the plays of Shakespeare, David Bordwell on Hong Kong action films, Cleanth Brooks on Southern literature. Note that many of the works just cited offer rewards even to those entirely unacquainted with the artists and works in question. I suggest that we acknowledge a continuum linking the simplest examples of practical criticism, a basic thumbs up or thumbs down indicating which works to select—in effect, mere naming or pointing—to increasingly more detailed accounts setting out how and why works are to

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be savored, where this involves contextualizing those works, parsing their properties, proposing interpretations, and estimating their significance. I suspect that the American public has recourse to criticism most often in selecting films and restaurants. And here the simpler modes prevail. The movie industry provides previews (misleadingly called trailers). A preview literally presents a chunk or chunks of a movie. Preconcert lectures for classical music audiences often do something similar, presenting key themes to listen for during the actual performance. This extends even to the art of literature. Poetry reviews quote excerpts of the work under discussion, and while a comparable practice for novels is not very practical, this may be changing with the ascension of online vendors. Amazon.com tries to get publishers to provide tables of contents and sample pages and encourages users to nag publishers when these are not available. While restaurant reviews might seem an exception to this trend, they do provide descriptions of items on the menu. So readers with agile imaginations can perhaps vicariously sample the dishes described. In addition to these aids that provide appreciators with sample chunks of the works in question, there is also a range of more contextualizing criticism. This includes arts appreciation courses—surveys of the visual arts, music, literature, and so on. Often organized historically, such enterprises situate particular works within appropriate periods, movements, genres, styles, as well as within the career arcs of individual artists. There are also more local contextualizing aids. Museum visitors spend much of their time reading labels and placards—so much so that some descry the distracting presence of “books on the wall.” And of course docents leading groups through museum galleries are providing additional exegesis. There is similar support for the performing arts. Not only do programs for live musical and theatrical works contain copious background information— entire essays setting out the origins, structure, and meaning of each piece. But these are often supplemented by live conversations—lecture discussions by the performers in advance of the presentation as well post mortems after the fact, talks by artists when shows of their work opens, readings by poets that intersperse accounts of how various poems came about with the presentation of the work. The philosopher and critic Arthur Danto appeals to restaurant reviews in his introduction to The State of the Art to disparage what I would call practical criticism. Suggesting that much that passes for contemporary art criticism paints artists’ ambitions as no grander than those of chefs—“to give pleasure to a clientele sufficiently advanced in taste and discrimination

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to be responsive to subtleties, artisanship, and an occasional audacity,” Danto savages restaurant-review-style criticism in his typical bravura fashion.12 He notes that the food critic “compares dishes, makes recommendations, advises on the evenness and quality of service over time, carps, ecstacizes, keeps track of reputations, bestows and withdraws stars,” then goes on to complain that the art critics for The New Yorker did something very similar in the 1950s. “The reader was counseled on what galleries to visit, which artists were presenting what dishes for the refined eye, while the artist himself was measured against the connoisseur’s knowledge of what the artist had done before or what other artists were doing then.” 13 Contra Danto, and incorporating the distinctions sketched by Carroll and Lamarque, I want to make the case that restaurant review–style journalistic or consumer reporting criticism provides the best support for those seeking to find and fully appreciate worthy works.14 I believe that the activities Danto ascribes above to restaurant reviewers and art critics offer valuable and useful advice from which both diners and gallery goers can profit. And I believe this model holds across the arts. In what follows, I explore the threads set out in this introduction and build my case for a neo-Humean account of aesthetic debate and critical advice. Chapter 1 examines gustatory taste and inquires whether it is an appropriate model for aesthetic taste in general. Two opposing worries regarding reliance on critical advice— concerns about leveling and concerns about elitism—are also discussed. Chapter 2 sets out the justificatory structure of our arguments about art and proposes that aesthetic qualities play a basic role in such contestation. Competing accounts of aesthetic qualities are compared; a broadened understanding of this category emerges in the end. Chapter 3 presents and refines David Hume’s classic proposal regarding artistic and aesthetic debate, namely, that there is a set of ideal critics whose convergent judgments constitute a standard of taste. Chapter 4 takes up some challenges concerning the role played by the test of time in identifying the ideal Humean critics (if any) among us. Chapter 5 probes the possibility of disagreement among ideal critics and the prospects for realism in aesthetics. An argument between Alan Goldman, who supports non-realism, and Jerrold Levinson, who supports realism, is tracked to what appears to be a verificationist impasse. Two pieces of machinery are introduced to resolve this debate: the Suitability Requirement, a restriction that guides the assignment of works to critics; and Critic Clusters, a construct that provides a metric for comparing peer judgments among those critics. Chapter 6 turns to the relations between critics and those they advise. The discus-

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sion is organized around two challenges posed by Jerrold Levinson, the problem of training up (why abandon the works we like for more difficult works that critics recommend?) and the problem of authenticity (don’t we lose something of ourselves, and become more like everyone else, if we allow critics to shape our taste?). The end result is a more robust understanding of Alan Goldman’s advice that we each find and follow critics whose taste we share. Chapter 7 concludes by examining several applications of the account of critical advice defended here. Comparisons and contrasts with nature appreciation are entertained; literature, film, and architecture are taken up as test cases, as each presents particular appreciative challenges; and the intersection of criticism and identity politics is examined. In closing, thoughts on two normative issues—mean critics and bad art— complete an account of how practical criticism can be vibrant, creative, engrossing, and useful.

1 · Taste and Preference

Gustatory taste is the literal counterpart to taste in art. I begin this chapter by asking whether gustatory taste might be a model as well as a metaphor. That is, is gustatory taste improvable, malleable, non-fungible in a way that illuminates our interactions with works of art? I offer up as an example my intractable loathing of blue cheese (although I know that gourmands consider it a prized delicacy) and compare and contrast it with the lack of venturesomeness with which children greet new foods, on the one hand, and the salutary effects of oenophiles’ expansive descriptive vocabulary, on the other. My guides through this territory include Carolyn Korsmeyer, who probes the distinction between taste and Taste in her 1999 book Making Sense of Taste, and a group of philosophers who rigorously examined our talk about wine in a 2004 conference and subsequent publications. With this background in place, I consider two opposing worries that arise regarding reliance on critical advice: concerns about leveling and concerns about elitism. The leveling worry applies to enterprises like Zagat and Wikipedia, where ratings and even knowledge are built from popular responses. I present the “most preferred painting” piece (or prank!) by the performance artists Komar and Melamid as a reductio of the leveling approach to critical assessment. The countervailing charge amounts to a worry about the entrenching of social privilege. Richard Shusterman’s critique of Hume and Pierre Bourdieu’s broader indictment of the notion of taste are examples of this view. Those who reject the concept of a canon would join in as fellow travelers on this issue. I believe that the neo-Humean view I set out in chapter 3 and further defend in chapters 4 and 5 will quiet this worry by anchoring evaluation in prior discernment of possessed properties and the interpretations that they ground.

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gu sTATory TA sTe In thinking about critics and how they shape our taste, it is tempting to look to literal taste—taste of the palate—as a first approximation of how taste might function in the broader realm of art. But questions immediately come to mind. How variable is gustatory taste? Are preferences for food and drink personal and idiosyncratic? Is this taste educable? Can we appeal to shared standards to resolve disagreement? Is there such a thing as expertise in tasting? If so, who can claim this authority? David Hume poses questions of this sort about taste in general in the relaxed and meandering introduction to his 1757 essay “Of the Standard of Taste,” a work that will occupy much of our attention in the pages that follow. Hume initially appears to endorse the Latin maxim De gustibus non est disputandum (There is no disputing of tastes).1 This time-honored saying pronounces it futile to dispute about matters of taste. Since they have to do with personal preference, disputes of this sort seem irresolvable; the idea of sorting correct from incorrect judgments is a nonstarter. Hume gradually unrolls his countervailing view in the course of his essay. But it is particularly tempting to adopt a sceptical point of view regarding gustatory taste. Consider an example. I dislike blue cheese. I know it is deemed a delicacy. I know it comes in many varieties and can be very expensive. I know it is considered an enhancement in many recipes and embellishes many dishes at high- end restaurants. Nonetheless, it makes me gag. I can’t imagine any regimen that might make me change my mind. Effusive praise from others, proffered bribes, equally vivid threats or penalties, programs of de-sensitization. Nothing would seem to turn the tide. I do agree that our gustatory preferences can change and mature. But I can’t imagine anything that might alter my intractable loathing of blue cheese. This example encourages us to see gustatory taste as entrenched and stubborn, not subject to rational persuasion. The fact that others like blue cheese does not seem to provide a compelling reason for me to come to like it, nor are admirers of this food likely to come up with further facts about blue cheese or overlooked aspects of its flavor that will convert me. Children’s dislike of new foods provides another illustration of the irrationality of taste. A study in Contemporary Pediatrics reports that nearly two-thirds of parents report problems in this area.2 Recalcitrance at the dinner table evokes familiar admonitions, with reluctant eaters exhorted to try just one bite, to clean their plates if they hope for dessert, or to think

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of other less fortunate children going hungry in distant parts of the world. “Picky eating” is such a common problem that googling reveals a wealth of websites offering counsel and advice.3 One such site proposes an evolutionary reason for this pattern: being standoffish and hard to please might protect children from poisoning and other culinary misadventures.4 The authors speculate that children’s “instinctive desire for sweet and salty foods, and [their] instinctive aversion to sour and bitter tastes” might be “a trait left over from our ‘caveman’ days . . . [ensuring] that youngsters wouldn’t wander off and nibble on poisonous plants and berries, many of which are not sweet.” This may be unconvincing as an evolutionary just-so story, given the wide variety of things children are willing to put in their mouths. Nonetheless, children’s stubborn rejection of new foods is so prevalent that researchers have named the pattern neophobia (fear of new foods) and report that “neophobia reaches its peak between the ages of two and six years—when rejection of vegetables reaches an all-time high.” A recent venture chronicled in the New York Times underscores this theme. Six second graders from PS 295 in Brooklyn were treated to a $220 seven-course tasting meal at Daniel Boulud’s exclusive Manhattan restaurant Daniel.5 A video posted on the Times website presented their (predictable) reactions to caviar, arugula, lobster salad, fish cured with smoked red paprika, and much, much more. Comments from the children included “It tastes like soap” and “It’s disgusting,” although there was also an exclamation of “Awesome.” The favorite courses seemed to be beef and dessert. Some might have moral qualms about eager adults, let alone unappreciative children, consuming $220 meals in an era when food pantries struggle to serve a growing clientele. Clearly the second graders would need some sort of gradual program (habituation? desensitization?) to inculcate a genuine liking for many of the components of their luncheon feast. The advice dispensed on various picky- eating websites emphasizes the importance of building venturesomeness slowly and gradually. Reluctant children should be exhorted to take a bite or try a taste. They should not be offered food rewards—a cookie if you first eat a mouthful of broccoli—as this might encourage deleterious culinary habits. The fact that most children gradually enlarge their set of acceptable foods suggests that our initial prejudices can be reformed and our horizons expanded. Does this tilt the scales in favor of objectivity and persuasion when it comes to gustatory taste? What if our tastes broaden but don’t converge? That would still seem to leave gustatory taste a realm of rampant subjectivity. Some facts appear to counterbalance claims of the irrationality of taste.

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For example, subscribers to Consumer Reports can find articles evaluating ice creams, peanut butter, breakfast cereals, and more. At the very least, this presumes that experts can be identified, that objective aspects of tasting and eating can be shared, and that competing varieties of a given type of food can be rated and ranked. Consider too the growing claque of selfdescribed “foodies” who go about pursuing, analyzing, and savoring encounters with food.6 They read food magazines, attend tastings, follow culinary blogs, pore over restaurant reviews, watch TV shows devoted to food and cooking7, use vacations to pursue culinary tourism. This too presupposes some degree of intersubjectivity. Foodies have recently extended to other comestibles the attention that oenophiles have traditionally devoted to wine. Aficionados can not only frequent wine tastings but also attend tastings of beer, single malt scotch, tea, coffee, olive oil, honey, chocolate, and cheese. At such events, discrimination is taught and modelled, rankings are proposed and defended. The notion of terroir, originally a term for capturing the way a wine’s taste can evidence the soil in which its grapes were grown (and, more broadly, the climate and geography of its home vineyard and the culture of its producing nation) is applied to these other products as well. Which of these divergent attitudes toward taste should prevail? In her masterful 1999 book Making Sense of Taste, Carolyn Korsmeyer traces the fortunes of gustatory taste, showing how it has been misunderstood by laypeople and disparaged by Western philosophy. Part of her mission is to rehabilitate literal taste as a cognitive as well as a pleasure-processing faculty. I would like to follow in some of her footsteps as she argues that gustatory taste is not simply stubborn, ignorant, and brute, but can indeed be a proper source of aesthetic assessment and appreciation. After filling out in more detail the received view of taste, I will track Korsmeyer’s journey through some scientific and philosophical changes rung on this notion. Let us apply the term “received view” to the attitude toward gustatory taste conveyed by the De gustibus maxim. Such taste is disparaged for being variable and idiosyncratic. As my examples have suggested, gustatory taste also appears stubborn and intransigent, based more on whim than on objective assessment of the foodstuffs being sampled. If gustatory taste is not susceptible to rational persuasion, then it is not a candidate for refinement and education. I have labeled this the received view of taste to indicate that many of us would likely endorse it, at least initially. Some of us flesh out this picture with some quasi-scientific lore—a sense of the tongue as the locus of taste, with a traditional map subdividing it into re-

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gions sensitive to different basic tastes. Old time accounts of taste suggested that there are four basic modalities—sour, sweet, salty, and bitter— with dedicated taste-buds attuned to each occupying different sections of the tongue. This familiar story is twice wrong, in that recent research has found out that taste buds don’t specialize. They are all responsive to all the basic flavors, though some may be more finely attuned to one of those. Thus that old map is outmoded. Moreover, the so- called basic flavors no longer comprise the set of four just listed; a fifth flavor, umami, was added in the early twentieth century. It is the robust flavor associated with glutamate, present in certain meats, mushrooms and Asian sauces (soy sauce, fermented fish sauce). Some suggest that there is also a sixth basic flavor linked to fats. Overly simple versions of the received view must also be corrected to indicate that the sense of taste doesn’t emanate solely from the tongue. Or to put it another way, the sense of taste partners with the senses of smell and touch to deliver a full and complete gustatory experience. While Korsmeyer distinguishes Taste from taste to separate out general aesthetic appreciation from more narrow sensory discernment, she draws a further contrast within the latter realm, distinguishing taste sensation, owed solely to the tongue, from taste experience, which results from the three senses working in concert.8 Brillat-Savarin drew a similar distinction when he contrasted direct with complete and reflective taste sensations.9 Presentday philosopher Kent Bach also acknowledges this partnership through his contrast between taste and flavor.10 This interdependence does penetrate the received view to some extent. At the very least, many of us know that when a cold clogs our nose and blocks our sense of smell, we taste with much less acuity. We also acknowledge that both taste and smell operate on a bell curve, becoming less sensitive as we age. Nutritional problems in later life arise in part because food doesn’t taste as appetizing to oldsters as it used to. While many might realize that taste and smell work in tandem, acknowledging the role of touch can require a bit more prompting. But the texture of foods, as well as hotness in both its literal (e.g., temperature) and metaphorical (e.g., chili peppers) senses, contribute to our overall gustatory experience. Some might disparage the sense of taste because it needs the aid of other senses to deliver a full experience. This suggests that gustatory taste alone is inadequate. The fact that taste always seems to involve some degree of hedonic inflection—like or dislike, pleasure or displeasure—is an additional source of concern. Not only does the connection with pleasure

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situate taste as potentially frivolous, at least from a Puritan point of view, but the hedonic dimensions of taste set it up to be abused; they invite us to link taste with excess and self-indulgence. In all these respects, taste seems rooted in the body and its needs. Here is the worry that emerges: taste caters to, can be controlled by, our less admirable desires and impulses. Korsmeyer incorporates many of these criticisms when she lays out what she calls the hierarchy of the senses, an implicit division that gives pride of place to sight and hearing while simultaneously demoting touch, smell, and taste as lower and inferior capacities. Korsmeyer traces this tradition back to the ancient Greek philosophers. The fact that sight and hearing operate at a distance from their objects, together with the fact that these senses are pre- eminent ways of attaining knowledge of the physical world, sets up an unflattering contrast with the remaining three senses. Consider first the fact of proximity. It aligns the so- called bodily senses with less noble human functions. In order for us to taste, touch, or smell particular items, they have to be up against us—in the case of taste, they are literally taken into us and become transformed into a part of us, either building parts of our bodies or joining the exiting stream of waste. For this reason gustatory taste can seem debased and disgusting. Such taste begins to function when entering foodstuffs are masticated and mixed with saliva. While most of what we take in is swallowed and subjected to the processes of digestion, absorption, and excretion, a small sample enters into the taste pores that populate our tongue, palate, and epiglottis. The ensuing reactions stimulate our nervous system and send areas of the brain messages regarding the stuff we have taken into our mouths. Olfaction, gustatory taste’s partner sense, works somewhat similarly. While we don’t have to cram objects up our noses in order to smell them, chemicals that they emit do have to ascend our nasal cavities and stimulate the receptors in the hairs within. Passages connecting our sinuses to the back of the throat provide a secondary olfactory path; here food about to be swallowed and enter into alimentary and digestive processes has a second opportunity to stimulate our sense of smell. Just as there is a basic set of flavors, so too is there a foundational set of odors. According to one source, the one thousand to four thousand different scents of which humans can become aware can be classified into ten major groups: fragrant, fruity, citrus, woody/resinous, chemical, sweet, minty, toasted/nutty, pungent, decayed (see the website Gizmodo). Note that neither phenomenological taste nor phenomenological smell is subject to the sort of compositionality that allows compound tastes or

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smells to be understood—and learned—as weighted combinations of the basic elements.11 In some realms, such compositionality seems essential for effective knowledge building. Consider how sentence meaning is a combination of the meaning of a sentence’s component words, with further variation to be explained by reference to context. Now contrast the case of taste experience. A famous example from John Locke, pointing out the experiential basis for sensory knowledge, is relevant here. Locke observed that the only way to know (to understand) the taste of pineapple is to have direct acquaintance with it—that is, to put some in one’s mouth. One could not explain the distinctive taste to someone who had never had this experience by describing it as a weighted sum of sweetness, sourness, bitterness, saltiness, and umami. At least not in a way that would distinguish the taste of pineapple from the taste of mango or from the (perhaps more distant?) taste of coffee.12 Since compositionality is a model for knowability, the failure of compositionality to apply to the bodily senses impugns them.13 In addition to these challenges to sensory knowledge in general, some individuals fall short as tasters; they are less able to discern the full range of flavors. Just as individuals can be color blind or tone deaf, we can document differences in people’s gustatory and olfactory responsiveness. In the 1930s, scientists discovered a population with special acuity. They have come to be known as supertasters, and they represent about 25 percent of the current US population. Supertasters are particularly sensitive to the chemicals PTC (phenylthiocarbamide) and PROP (6-n-propylthiouriacil). Both taste dreadfully bitter to them while leaving the rest of us unscathed. This heightened sensitivity to bitterness sullies supertasters’ experiences with brussels sprouts, broccoli, red wine, coffee, and the like. The sense of smell exhibits similar variation.14 Some of these differences can be traced to physiological factors. It turns out that supertasters have a greater number of fungiform papillae on their tongues. There is also a genetic basis for supertasters’ acuity.15 The term “supertasters” seems an honorific. Do those supertasters taste, for example, broccoli “as it really is,” while the rest of us remain mistaken or deceived? This is, of course, the $64,000 question. Most philosophers, and no doubt many scientists as well, view our experience of secondary qualities as response- dependent. This means that the experience of, say, phenomenal red is understood in a relativized manner. It is the color experience that stop lights, ripe tomatoes, and certain gerani-

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ums generate in perceivers with a visual system like ours. As a consequence, synaesthetes, whose color experiences are multi-modal, and color-blind perceivers, whose experiences reverse spectrum elements or fade them all into shades of gray, are considered outliers. Gustatory taste is also conceived as response-dependent. We theorize the terrain in terms of perceivers with sensory organs and nervous systems like our own. Such assumptions surely guided taste researchers who have developed an artificial tongue.16 However, we don’t seem to impose a similar sort of normativity in this realm. While supertasters comprise only a quarter of the population, we don’t dismiss them as aberrant perceivers. Thus we do not treat taste, smell, and touch on a par with vision and hearing in this regard. We respond to variability by downgrading entire senses rather than disparaging individual perceivers. In Making Sense of Taste, Korsmeyer traces with great care the reputation of the senses from classical times on. She definitively documents the hierarchical view in the writings of both Plato and Aristotle. Not only does she demonstrate a divide separating out the two more highly esteemed senses, sight and hearing, from the remaining trio variously impugned as bodily or chemical senses; she also shows how this plays into an overarching structure, a gendered hierarchy which aligns and elevates one set of entities traditionally associated with men and sets these above and in opposition to a corresponding set associated with women. Here are the paired categories; in each case, the left-hand element is valorized while that on the right is demeaned and depreciated: man/woman mind/body reason/emotion culture/nature the public sphere/ the domestic sphere It seems highly plausible that these oppositional pairs would travel in concert, as each duality complements and reinforces the others. On the resulting view, men are culture builders doing important work in the public sphere while women are relegated to less essential supporting roles in the private sphere of the household. One might rightly counter that bearing and raising children is as important for humanity’s continued success as any social or political tasks in the public sphere. But the regard in which

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women’s reproductive capabilities are held—some tincture of awe and disgust (consider the restrictions many societies place on menstruating women)— offers some support for the demeaning of traits associated with women. Feminists have long decried this sort of thinking; for example, Karen Warren attacks what she calls value dualisms in her exposition and defense of ecofeminism.17 Korsmeyer’s contribution to the debate occurs when she offers her positive theory that presents taste as a source of objective knowledge of the world rather than merely a window into various states of tasters’ bodies. This pries taste away from the negative associations conveyed by sketch above. Korsmeyer’s rehabilitation of gustatory taste proceeds on two fronts. She presents and discredits a number of arguments that purport to disparage such taste,18 but she also offers a positive portrayal of taste that identifies six dimensions or determinants of taste, each conveniently labeled with a mnemonic letter: B, H, C, T, O, or P. Presumably, contemplating these factors and their interplay will convince us of the inadequacy of the received view of taste. The B, H, and C dimensions of taste indicate a trio of background effects: unchangeable factors owing to an individual taster’s physiology and bodily make-up, for example a predilection for sweets or a heightened sensitivity to bitter flavors (B); variable factors in place at the time of tasting, for example being hungry, or having just eaten a punishingly hot chili pepper (H); and cultural factors that influence all tasters within a given society, for example, religious prohibitions that forbid certain foods or regional practices that foreground others (C). The T dimension of taste is meant to flag the fact that taste tells us something very local about the state of our bodies, in particular, those parts against which tasted items abut or through which they flow; the O dimension is meant to counterbalance this interiority and the subjectivism and relativism it might seem to usher in by indicating that tastes inform us about properties of objects in the world, the foods and beverages we consume. The final dimension, P, indexes the pleasure or pain that accompanies (or follows) the tasting, and so is a modifier of T, O, or both. Does Korsmeyer’s approach succeed? One place to look to the functioning of a properly esteemed sense of taste is in the literature surrounding the appreciation of wine. Though some dismiss oenophiles as precious snobs, they have developed an intricate theory and vocabulary on which to hang their analyses and judgments.19 Moreover, their debates prefigure many of the topics that will occupy us when we take up the appreciation of fine art.

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oenophiLe s And experTise Oenophiles are lovers of wine. Wikipedia’s explanation of this term adds that their practice involves “disciplined devotion” linked to “strict traditions of consumption and appreciation.”20 When oenophiles are also professional philosophers, we can expect especially penetrating discussion and debate of their preferred beverage and the deep questions to which it gives rise. Such was the case in a 2004 symposium on philosophy and wine at the University of London. Now enshrined in an eponymously subtitled volume edited by Barry Smith,21 the presentations make vivid some central issues regarding aesthetic appreciation, gustatory taste, and critical standing. Roger Scruton throws considerable cold water on the project from the get-go. Though he lauds the intoxicating power of wine, he denies that it can be a source of aesthetic value or interest. In particular, he claims that tastes and smells fall short because they cannot exhibit ordering or structure. Making points about smells that he later extends to tastes, Scruton claims that when assembled, they either “mingle” and lose their distinctive characteristic or “remain free-floating and unrelated, unable to generate expectation, tension, harmony, suspension, or release” (5).22 Scruton relegates both tastes and smells to the category of “secondary objects” in light of these deficits. The term is meant to recall the ontological status of secondary qualities, which are not real features of things but mere powers in them to cause responses in us. Scruton believes that tastes and smells are similarly not present in the objects that seem to possess them. By contrast, Smith argues for the objectivity of gustatory taste and for the importance of expertise in discerning the qualities of fine wine. He frames the argument for objectivity by noting our ability to distinguish appearance from reality in the realm of taste. For example, he proposes that one cannot discern the true taste of a wine if one sips it after consuming a mouthful of watercress (62). Moreover, deeming the watercressmuncher’s description of the wine false or misleading creates logical space for a correct account of that gustatory experience. “Mistaken” and “correct” are correlative notions; neither gets traction unless the other is in place as well. Since our ability to rule out some tastes as altered or erroneous makes room for us to laud others as true, a prerequisite for deeming taste objective is seemingly secured. Smith cites additional examples of “blocking” experiences elsewhere in his essay: “We distinguish . . . between the way a wine tastes, and how it tastes to us after sucking a lemon. We are not tempted to equate the

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taste of a Meursault with how it tastes to us after brushing our teeth. . . . I can predict that you will fail to notice the tender raspberry fruit of Nicolas Potel’s 2001 Volnay Les Caillerets if you have been eating a plate of kippers” (47). Here is his takeaway from these accumulated instances: “As long as there is room for a distinction between the taste of a wine and how it tasted under particular conditions there will be no reason to conclude that a taste is constituted and exhausted by the individual experience of a taster. No convincing case has yet been made for saying that tastes are subjective” (47). We can supplement this argument based on error by noting some of the positive evidence Smith assembles for objectivity, namely, the convergence and agreement achieved in wine-tasting practice. He claims, “There is every reason to think tastes are there to be detected. We draw each other’s attention to what we have noticed in a wine. ‘Do you get the pear?’ we may say when tasting a white Burgundy, or ‘Fig??’ when tasting a Rhone” (45). Presumably such hints prompt acquiescence more often than not, a sign that those tastes really are in place and available to all properly situated appreciators. This last point suggests an additional dimension to the case for objectivity, one tied to knowledge and expertise. Recognized wine experts have accumulated a vast backlog of tasting experience. They can wield a special vocabulary that allows them to make elaborately nuanced observations in describing the taste—as well as the nose, mouth feel, balance, flavor, texture, finish, and more— of particular wines. More important, they can teach these terms to novices. The plethora of descriptions can seem daunting. Consider the Wine Aroma Wheel, developed by University of California–Davis flavor scientist Ann C. Noble to regiment and provide an objective framework for wine tasters’ descriptions. The wheel organizes possible flavors in twelve separate categories.23 Outcomes can be multiplied by spinning the device and bringing different possibilities into juxtaposition. The somewhat similarly structured Tasting Note Aids, posted online at BetterTastingWine.com, provides a gridded array that distributes ninety possible tastes across ten categories. A quick application of combinatorial math suggestions that either system can generate a vast number of distinct taste descriptions. Once neophytes know that wine tasting can sustain such fine-grained distinctions, they can start to look for them in their own experience. They can seek help by consulting these charts and wheels, buying books, reading reviews, attending tastings, signing up for classes. Presumably such activities can develop their facility with the sensory, cognitive, and affective dimensions of wine.

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Does the existence of a wine “curriculum” and of experts who are adept with its principles and terminology point to an objective grounding for both the science and the aesthetics of wine? Scruton predictably disparages “winespeak,” claiming that “it is not describing the way the wine is, but merely the way it tastes” (7). By contrast, linguist Adrienne Lehrer has written at length about our expansive wine vocabulary. Her contribution to Smith’s edited volume takes a close look at metaphors drawn from the semantic field of personality terms. She notes that terms popular in the 1970s—among them, serious, disciplined, austere, forward, assertive— have been supplemented by an even more colorful set of metaphors including shy, sly, generous, mean, polite, bold, in-your-face, loud, sassy, ostentatious, and flamboyant (130). Clearly Lehrer treats this as an area for serious study. Moreover, her article alerts us to the importance of critical disagreement. Whether the topic is fine wine or fine art, irresolvable disagreement between experts would seem to tell against the intuition that realism reigns in these realms. Toward the end of the article, Lehrer herself wonders whether experts can “consistently and consensually distinguish between brawny, muscular, and big-boned wines” (135). And how might any of these contrast with a wine deemed mean? Objectivity is seemingly supported when experts agree. Yet we can’t expect the opinions of wine experts to totally converge. One solution might be to develop a fuller account of how expertise operates in this realm. Lehrer acknowledges a range of participants: wine scientists, sommeliers, individuals in the wine trade, wine writers, enthusiasts who have learned about wine through reading and seminars, and finally, novices and wine drinkers with less experience (132–33). She outlines a hierarchy marked by the willingness to defer: “There exists a chain of ‘respect,’ from the novices, who defer to the expertise of wine writers and wine sellers, who in turn defer to the scientists” (133). She also indicates that experts evaluate wine in light of background information: “A wine could be evaluated in terms of various norms: for all wines, for red wines, for Merlots, for Merlots from California, from a particular year, winery, etc. Therefore, any utterance must be indexed for the relevant context” (134)24. This suggests we  could sort critics according to the knowledge and experience they recruit in tasting while also tracking any partiality or bias that might be in play. With such an account in hand, conflicting assessments could be weighed against the background and situation of the legitimate critics presenting them, and some aspiring appreciators might be denied standing in the debate.25

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Kent Bach, another contributor to Smith’s volume, holds a more deflationary view of the effects of knowledge and expertise. He grounds his position in a distinction between sensory and cognitive pleasures. Bach maintains that we can all, from the get go, experience the full range of tastes present in a wine even though we lack the vocabulary needed to pin them down.26 (And as just noted, we can study up and learn that vocabulary.) While Bach grants that expertise can deliver the cognitive pleasures of identification, recall, and taxonomy, he holds that these constitute an addition to the basic sensory pleasure tasters have already gleaned from their initial sips of each wine. Bach summarizes his position with the declaration that “wine tasting is not like bird watching and train spotting . . . [where] . . . the pleasure is in the recognizing and identifying” (29). The disanalogy contrasts comparative pleasure, in this case, pleasure in classifying and remembering, with “the intrinsic sensuous pleasure in tasting itself ” (35). For Bach, mastering an elaborate wine vocabulary does not allow novices to taste qualities they previously overlooked but rather “puts into words what [they] had already sensed but weren’t able to articulate” (37). What might confirm Bach’s strong claim that novice tasters can access the full sensory range any wine provides?27 Attempts to test his view raise the venerable problem of other minds.28 Simply put, others’ minds remain a mystery to us. How can we ever know what another’s taste experiences are really like or what affects and alters them? I will return to this issue at intervals in the following chapters. For now, let me introduce one last philosopher- oenophile whose view both complicates and challenges the role of expertise. In his paper “Expression and Objectivity in the Case of Wine,” Cain Todd appears to support Bach’s position.29 Todd’s remark that “the ability to discriminate brings its own kind of pleasure” (105) acknowledges one of the cognitive delights that, according to Bach, experts are specially positioned to enjoy. But Todd adds a Waltonian twist to his account.30 He maintains that wines are correctly described and evaluated only when they are judged within the correct category.31 On this view, it matters whether an (expert) taster knows that she is sampling, say, an expensive California cabernet bottled only a year ago. Note that this coheres with Lehrer’s suggestion that wine tasting is guided by a set of governing norms. Todd’s addendum is important. By suggesting that knowledge can inform and alter basic sensory experience, it challenges the equivalence Bach posits between novice and expert taste experience. If knowledge

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affects what we taste, we should expect experts to taste more, taste differently. Bach would presumably counter that the added knowledge provides experts a wider range of labels to characterize their experience, but doesn’t change it qualitatively. Can we adjudicate this dispute? Certainly the very same substances are providing the sensory stimuli when novices and experts sip the same wine. And an expert’s tasting career would not have altered his or her sensory organs. But perhaps there are changes in how the sensory information is processed upstream. Todd takes up a topic that seems relevant here, the phenomenon of blind tasting.32 He suggests that the practice “explicitly recognizes the adverse effects that knowledge (and various personal preferences and prejudices) can have on expectation and perception-it hence guards against the wrong type of categorisation” (104). Experts in fact falter in blind tastings. Several infamous experiments seem to indicate that our tasting experience is cognitively penetrable, affected by background beliefs, prejudices, and expectations.33 Todd concludes that “a proper appreciation and understanding of wine requires, contra Scruton [and, I would add, contra Bach], knowledge, education, comparison, and culture” (105). But considerable more work is required to determine just what sorts of knowledge are efficacious and welcome.

LeT Ting The s Cien TisT s speAk One might object that the discussion to date has blurred or run together two aspects of taste that should remain distinct—its phenomenological and its physiological dimensions.34 While the phenomenological aspects of taste are accessed via introspection and self-report, the physiological dimensions are investigated via chemical analysis, neurological study, and more. The fact that taste and smell are referred to as the chemical senses is relevant to this divide. Scientists have amassed a detailed account of the workings of these senses at the cellular level. Perhaps appeal to scientific accounts can resolve the puzzles about objectivity and expertise that arose in our perusal of wine connoisseurship. Consider the information available to nonspecialists. Presumably there is considerable trickle down from scientific journals to popular sources. Here are the results of some quick online searching. One site, Neuroscience Online, offers a chapter on the Chemical Senses.35 Author Max Hutchins sets the stage by explaining the structure and functioning of taste receptors.36 He then details the ways these cells signal the pres-

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ence of salty, sour, sweet, and bitter substances, specifying the receptor proteins and ions involved. For example, the presence of salt is announced by the diffusion of sodium ions, that of sweet compounds by the binding of a G-s protein that activates a messenger enzyme, adenylyl cyclase. Though detecting any of the five basic flavors seems a straightforward and “atomic” task from the phenomenological point of view, accounts of the underlying chemical, cellular, and neurophysiological processes show that this apparently simple skill is realized by an incredibly elaborate set of goings- on. And the complexity increases greatly if we instead seek a scientific explanation of our ability to identify the complex flavors in a glass of fine wine. Researchers at the University of California–Davis Department of Viticulture and Enology pursue just such a project. An article by Amy Coombs, “Scientia Vitis: Decanting the Chemistry of Wine Flavor,” summarizes their work.37 Tasters are often advised to focus on acids, tannins, and sugars in assessing a wine. Yet even here, scientists don’t agree. Coombs notes that “while tannins have always played a key role in the vocabulary of connoisseurs, scientists are not convinced that the molecules are related to flavor.” They withhold assent because the molecules in question don’t interact with a smell receptor. The manner in which acids contribute to tartness is also debated. Coombs indicates some additional factors that come into play in assessing wine: “Acids, sugars, and tannins are the most obvious contributors to wine flavor, but these three classes of molecules are accompanied by a remarkably varied cast of organic molecules— often aromatics—that, in combination, can produce an astonishing variety of flavors. Generally speaking, fruity flavors are attributed to interactions among esters, alcohols, and acids. Tannins, or phenol compounds, give wine an astringent mouthfeel, and sugars determine the sweetness of the wine. Yet to make things even more complicated, the interaction of these chemicals seems to depend on growing conditions and fermentation practices.” Unfortunately, a full explanation of individual flavors is not yet available. Coombs quotes viticulture professor Robert Boulton who notes that “after 2,000 years of winemaking, only a few molecules have been correlated with a specific flavor.” He offers one instance where a direct link has been established: “methoxypyrazines, a family of molecules that makes wine taste like bell pepper.” The article cites a few additional cases where scientists can link specific molecules to distinct flavors: “Short- chain vol-

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atile aldehydes like hexanal, pentanal, and nonanal have been shown to contribute grassy, nut-like, and orange-rose flavors, respectively. Specific terpenes have been shown to give Riesling its unique aroma. Glycosides from cabernet sauvignon and merlot grapes are thought to smell like fig, tobacco, and chocolate, but the flavors haven’t been correlated with a specific compound.” Coombs’s conclusion reveals how much remains for scientists to accomplish: “For all of the efforts toward systematic measurement methods, however, the structure of wine flavor hasn’t become any more lucid. New molecules are discovered in wine every year, but very few are shown to play a direct role in flavor or aroma. Even as future research correlates core aspects of wine back to flavor molecules, the synergistic interactions between key compounds will have to be analyzed.” Another online article that fills out this picture is David Derbyshire’s confrontational piece from 2013, “Wine Tasting—It’s Junk Science.”38 Like Coombs, Derbyshire spells out the chemical causes of specific tastes. Here are a few passages: The grassy, gooseberry quality of sauvignon blanc, for instance, comes from a class of chemicals called methoxypyrazines. These contain nitrogen and are byproducts of the metabolism of amino acids in the grape. Concentrations are higher in cooler climates, which is why New Zealand sauvignon blancs are often more herbaceous than Australian ones. The flowery aroma of muscat and gewürztraminer comes from a class of alcohol compounds called monoterpenes. These include linalool—a substance also used in perfumes and insecticide—and geraniol, a pale yellow liquid that doubles up as an effective mosquito repellent and gives geranium its distinctive smell. The spicy notes of chardonnay have been attributed to compounds called megastigmatrienones, also found in grapefruit juice. Knowledge of the effects of the various chemicals mentioned by these authors—methoxypyrazines, aldehydes, terpenes, glycosides, megastigmatrienones—would be of use to scientists studying the workings of taste. And taste laboratories engaged in a wide variety of projects— conducting pure research on our perceptual systems, seeking medical and pharmaceutical applications, furthering the interests of food manufacturers and marketers— do indeed investigate the characteristic taste of a range of individual compounds and also the taste of combinations. Thus

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researchers at Philadelphia’s Monell Chemical Senses Center investigate taste suppression and enhancement in mixtures, among countless other projects.39 Presumably flavorists elsewhere advise companies on how to produce, for example, convincing barbecue or sour cream and onion flavored potato chips. The current state of research into taste and flavor suggests that scientifically minded oenophiles can access detailed accounts correlating specific chemical compounds with specific aspects of wine. But is such information of use to the average taster? Let us return to the contrast emphasized by Cain Todd between expert and neophyte wine tasters. I have suggested that certain experiments call expertise into question. This indictment is conveyed even by the title of Derbyshire’s online article assimilating wine tasting to junk science. Author David McRaney is a fellow traveler. In an article titled “You Are Not So Smart: Why We Can’t Tell Good Wine from Bad,”40 McRaney writes that “wine tasters will mention all sorts of things they can taste in a fine wine as if they were a human spectrograph with the ability to sense the molecular makeup of their beverage. Research shows, however, this perception can be hijacked, fooled, and might just be completely wrong.” He goes on to describe two infamous experiments conducted by Frédéric Brochet at the University of Bordeaux in 2001. In the first, undergraduate wine students were asked to describe two wines, one red, the other white, in as much detail as possible. Unbeknownst to them, Brochet had placed the same white wine in both bottles, then added red dye to one. The subjects applied a vastly different vocabulary to the two samples, characterizing the dyed wine in terms appropriate to only a deeply fruity red. Subjects in another experiment were tricked when one and the same wine was dispensed from different bottles, one indicative of grand cru, the other of mere “table wine.” In that experiment, the subjects lauded the cheap wine in the expensive bottle, deeming it complex and rounded. When the very same wine was dispensed from the humbly labeled bottle, the tasters characterized it as weak and flat. This seems to vindicate Todd’s suspicions regarding the cognitive penetrability of our taste experience. Interestingly, there are similar experimental results when scientists probe our olfactory responses. Just as supertasters are distinguished by their reaction to certain seemingly bitter compounds that leave the rest of us unbothered, there are compounds that flag a divide in subjects’ sensitivity to smell. In his article, “Do You Taste What I Taste? The Physiology of the Wine Critic,” Mike Steinberger reports on a visit to the Monell Chem-

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ical Senses Laboratory in Philadelphia.41 Scientist Charles Wysocki told him about the compound andostenone,” a mammalian pheromone found in boar saliva. In a random sampling of one hundred people, around half will detect nothing, fifteen or so will smell an inoffensive musky-floralwoody aroma, and the rest will be thoroughly repulsed by a liquid that, to them, reeks of stale urine or particularly nasty body odor.” Another compound that allows scientists to divide the population according to olfactory sensitivity is Galaxolide, a chemical used primarily in cosmetics; according to Wysocki, around 60 percent of us can smell Galaxolide, and the rest cannot. Wysocki also told of an experiment he conducted that mirrors, for smell, Brochet’s results with disguised or misrepresented wines. The compound butyric acid has an odor that subjects varyingly describe as vomit, perspiration, or parmesan cheese depending on the context. When Wysocki places this acid in two jars, one labeled “Food,” the other labeled “Body,” “on average 60 percent of the people in the room will claim they enjoy the aroma in the ‘Food’ jar, with most saying it’s redolent of Parmesan cheese; but when he asks if anyone found the ‘Body’ jar pleasant, no hands go up— the participants invariably claim that it smells of puke or body odor.”42 Here even the hedonic character of a sensory experience varies with its prior framing. Steinberger’s takeaway from his investigation is an endorsement of relativism rather than realism in the realm of gustatory taste: “Memory, experience, and expectations play an enormous part in how individuals react to aromas and flavors, and may even be determinative. Why we notice some flavors and aromas but not others, and why we enjoy some but not others, results from the interplay of visual cues, genetic endowments, physical attributes, and personality features. Because these traits vary dramatically from one individual to the next, flavor and aroma perceptions vary dramatically from one individual to the next.” I am not sure that Steinberger’s examples force us to embrace full-blown relativism. We can certainly concede that when our sense of taste is probed, information about each sample’s chemical makeup must be leavened with facts about the taster’s experience and expertise and as well as details about the context of tasting. Looking to see how verdicts cluster can help us build a more detailed account of the determinants of taste. It will turn out that similar caveats are applicable to the critical evaluation of art. In the chapters that follow, we will repeatedly be echoing and exploring points raised by this initial examination of wine tasting and connoisseurship.

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T wo worrie s: LeveLing And eLiTism I want to close this chapter by briefly considering two worries about the anointing of critics. They hold for those opining on the arts—painting, literature, film—as well as those attending to the literal taste experiences delivered by restaurants, wine, coffee, cheese. The first worry concerns leveling; the second concerns elitism. The thought that any task is furthered by the proper division of labor goes back well beyond Enlightenment economist Adam Smith and the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. Plato argued in the Republic that the ideal state would function best if each inhabitant performed the task to which he or she was most suited. A rule enforcing a “natural” division of labor of this sort would enhance efficiency, though in all likelihood at the cost of individual happiness.43 Alternatives to such an approach resist specialization. They urge everyone to pitch in and prize community and consensus rather than singularities of any sort. Leveling, then, is the notion that everyone is on a par, not only in terms of value but also capacity and contribution. Leveling occurs in various contexts. Egalitarian impulses in politics and the introduction of slang and new idioms to vernacular language are two obvious examples.44 The construction and spread of knowledge may seem more surprising ground for such an approach. But consider Wikipedia, which presents itself as “the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit.”45 The site was founded to support a vision of knowledge as a collective achievement. The fact that anyone can step in to revise, amend, extend, etc., an entry makes it the ultimate leveling project in epistemology.46 A similar dynamic obtains in the arts when expertise is downplayed and critical responses are welcomed from any and every member of the audience. The posting of online reviews exemplifies this trend. Readers can share book reviews on Amazon.com while sites such as IMDb (Internet Movie Database) and Rotten Tomatoes offer a similar platform for amateur movie reviewers. Netflix invites users to rate films and to indicate the types of film they prefer, though the information is put to the practical use of facilitating future suggestions.47 Opponents marshal arguments against leveling approaches to governance, knowledge-building, arts evaluation, and more. Consider one quirky example from the arts—the Most Perfect Painting project (or prank) by Russian émigré artists Komar and Melamid. The result can be viewed as a reductio of the entire notion of open criticism. Basically, Komar and

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Melamid developed a survey to determine the properties people in various cultures most wanted to see in a painting, then created works to satisfy each cohort.48 The questions and responses alone are highly entertaining, definitely orthogonal to the sorts of considerations we think make for value in the visual arts. Respondents were asked their favorite colors in a painting, favorite seasons, favorite landscape features, preferences for historical versus recent figures, for clothed versus naked figures, for wild versus domestic animals. Those who stated a preference for large paintings were then asked to specify whether they liked works the size of a wall, a refrigerator, or a dishwasher.49 The questions are comic because so many of them should have no bearing on the quality of a painting. But more important, the paintings that result from trying to satisfy the prevailing responses are utterly ludicrous. The American painting shows George Washington and three present- day figures on the banks of a large but nondescript lake in which two deer are wading. The work is clichéd, incoherent, and unengaging. The overall point, as it bears on the task of criticism, is this: creating so as to satisfy the desires of all—which amounts to treating everyone as an esteemed critic, that is, letting each person’s voice carry critical weight—results in truly terrible art. Whether there is some systematic way to identify worthy art is one of the motivating issues of this book.50 While worries about leveling in criticism suggest we shouldn’t give each and every view equal standing, new worries arise if we attempt to correct for this and select appropriate critics and curators. Whose taste should prevail? Elitism becomes the concern when the pendulum swings the other way and too few people’s views are counted, or only the views of those in a “club” with questionable membership criteria. The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu insisted that all exercises of critical taste are of this sort. His 1979 book Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste argues that our preferences for art—and even more importantly, for food—are inculcated early on and help maintain cultural capital and pass it along to succeeding generations. Thus for Bourdieu, aesthetic preferences inevitably function to mark privilege and status rather than to flag the objective value of items in the world. In his paper “On the Scandal of Taste,” Richard Shusterman advances a similar critique of those true judges or ideal critics identified by Hume. Shusterman suggests that “Hume’s good critic turns out to be not one without prejudices but simply one with the right prejudices” since for Hume “good taste requires a culturally acquired (more than merely natural) attitude which only the socially advantaged can properly exercise.”51

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The charge of elitism cannot be silenced as easily as the previous concern about leveling. We can’t expect critics to be entirely uninfluenced by the social world they inhabit. So we must carefully detail the appropriate ways in which critics’ views depend on the values and practices of their home societies. Any such account will profit from the notion of an artworld proposed by the eminent twentieth- century aestheticians Arthur Danto and George Dickie and taken up by subsequent analytic philosophers seeking to answer the question “What is art?” I will set out Dickie’s account of artworlds in chapter 2 and build on this discussion in chapter 3, where I present and assess David Hume’s theory of true judges or ideal critics. Hume’s groundbreaking account purports to offer a noncircular characterization of these prized individuals. I believe that Hume here puts in place an aesthetic version of the Copernican Revolution attributed to his near contemporary Immanuel Kant. Just as Kant’s transcendental approach reoriented us metaphysically, attributing the structure of the world not simply to reality itself but also to the nature of the mind experiencing it, so Hume relocates our sense of aesthetic value, redirecting our attention away from works of art and focusing instead on the traits of the critics appraising them. The neo-Humean view I set out in chapter 3 and further defend in chapters 4 and 5 quiets the worries visited in this closing section by anchoring evaluation in experts’ prior discernment of possessed properties and the observations, explications, and interpretations that those ground.

2 · Aesthetic Qualities

I maintain that there is a justificatory structure to our arguments about art, with this roughly pyramidal pattern in place: our claims about perceptual properties as well as other contextual and historical facts support attribution of aesthetic qualities; these in turn support claims about style and interpretation, which themselves then ground summary evaluations. I argue that aesthetic qualities are “where the action is” when it comes to aesthetic appreciation. I use Frank Sibley’s famous article as an entry point for discussion, setting out his key claims that aesthetic qualities are not condition-governed, and that taste or perceptiveness is required for their ascription. It follows that the ascription of aesthetic qualities is always contestable; their attribution is the first site of dispute when it comes to appreciating art. After visiting the notion of supervenience, I examine some more elaborate taxonomies for aesthetic qualities proposed by Alan Goldman and Noël Carroll, as well as some dissenting proposals from Marcia Eaton, Nick Zangwill, and Berys Gaut. This discussion results in an enlarged notion of aesthetic qualities and paves the way for the example of aesthetic disagreement I track in the following chapters. To conclude I flesh out the contextualism inherent in my account by presenting the central claim from Kendall Walton’s seminal paper “Categories of Art” as well as the notion of an artworld proposed by Arthur Danto and employed and elaborated by George Dickie.

Argumen T And Ju sTifiCATion I maintain that there is a justificatory structure to our arguments about art, with this roughly pyramidal pattern in place. Works of art possess both aes-

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thetic and non-aesthetic properties.1 Claims about factual and perceptual properties are cited to support attribution of aesthetic qualities; historical and contextual properties play a role as well.2 Aesthetic qualities are cited to support claims about style and interpretation. Interpretations figure centrally in supporting summary evaluations.3 Within this roughly pyramidal structure, elements on a given “level” find support below.4 Although ascription of aesthetic qualities can’t claim temporal priority,5 they come into play when there is a request for justification. In this regard, aesthetic qualities ground aesthetic contestation. Since an account of these qualities will figure in any explanation we craft of aesthetic appreciation and critical advice, clarifying their nature can help us understand appreciative practice and its underlying metaphysics. This chapter will take up that task.

Ae sTheTiC QuALiTie s: sibLey’s CL A ssiC exp o siTion I mentioned aesthetic qualities repeatedly in that opening paragraph. But just what are these? “Aesthetic” is a vexed term to try to pin down. It was coined by Alexander Baumgarten in his 1750 work Aesthetica. Baumgarten there characterized aesthetics as the science of sensible (as opposed to logical) cognition.6 Thus “aesthetic” is associated with sensory—as well as imaginative and emotional— experience. When present-day theorists contrast art and the aesthetic, they are signaling a divide between objects created by artists, on the one hand, and our reception of them, on the other.7 What then are aesthetic qualities? Frank Sibley gives this famous sampling in his article “Aesthetic Concepts”: unified, balanced, integrated, lifeless, serene, somber, dynamic, powerful, vivid, delicate, moving, trite, sentimental, tragic.8 This list is obviously meant to function as a definition by example. Sibley goes on to make two important points about such qualities: (1) taste or perceptiveness is required for their discernment, and (2) they are not condition-governed; no set of non-aesthetic qualities can guarantee the presence of a given aesthetic quality.9 Sibley’s mention of taste and perceptiveness recalls topics taken up in the preceding chapter. However, he is referring not to gustatory taste but to the broader category of aesthetic taste—Korsmeyer’s Taste as opposed to taste. So we need to get clear about Sibley’s first claim. Saying that taste or perceptiveness is required in order to note the presence of aesthetic properties suggests that their recognition isn’t easy or automatic. Not everyone will pick up on them, and no simple standard of correctness is available for vetting the claims in which they figure. Nor can we tell when

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Sibleyesque taste or perceptiveness is being exercised. This applies even in our own case, as effort and degree of difficulty aren’t appropriate markers here.10 Thus Sibley’s appeal to taste portrays aesthetic qualities as contestable in ways that non-aesthetic qualities are not. It seems wrongheaded to view individual taste as innate. Presumably this capacity develops over time. Do some never acquire it? Perhaps everyone has taste, in the sense of a fixed but evolving set of personal preferences, but some have bad taste. Determining whose taste, if any, should prevail, is the key question. Sibley’s second point, about non-condition-governedness, promises to reveal a bit more about how aesthetic claims are justified. Sibley admits that “aesthetic qualities ultimately depend upon the presence of features which . . . are visible, audible, or otherwise discernible without any exercise of taste or sensibility,” but he adds “what I want to make clear in this paper is that there are no non-aesthetic features which serve in any circumstances as logically sufficient conditions for applying aesthetic terms” (3–4). Note that the first point just reiterates the relationship said to hold between levels one and two of the pyramid described above. Some would flesh out the dependence Sibley posits between aesthetic and nonaesthetic properties as a form of supervenience. Supervenience obtains when two categories exhibit a dependence without collapse or reduction. An implicit metaphor of levels is in place here; we distinguish supervening and subvening arrays. If A is the supervening, or “upper-level,” category, then supervenience occurs whenever the following principle obtains: no change in A properties without a change in the underlying B properties.11 Candidate cases of supervenience relations include the mental supervening on the physical (my current thought of coffee results from a set of electrical/chemical goings- on in my brain), the moral supervening on the natural (the wrongness of my recent action is tied to the pain and suffering it caused), general truths supervening on particular truths (the fact that even numbers are divisible by two depends, in part, on the divisibility of the number sixteen). Taking an example from Sibley’s list of aesthetic terms— delicacy—let me list three non-aesthetic features on which a specific instance of delicacy might depend. An item that is pink, filigreed, and curvilinear might be deemed delicate in virtue of this trio of qualities. They count as non-aesthetic because they are purely perceptual; anyone acquainted with the meaning of English terms for colors, shapes, and textures could discern their presence without exercising any special faculty.12 Yet according to Sibley, the presence of these qualities can never guarantee that the item possessing them is delicate.

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This further examination leaves the workings of Sibleyesque taste or perceptiveness quite mysterious. Is the critic who correctly notes the delicacy of an object any less puzzling than a dowser finding water with her divining rod? The logical worry that ensues is that a vicious circularity infects Sibley’s key notions. What are aesthetic qualities? Those identified by discerning appreciators. Who are discerning appreciators? Those who can identify aesthetic qualities.13 Thus overall it seems that Sibley’s initial condition characterizing aesthetic qualities in terms of taste or perceptiveness leaves us unable to effectively delimit the set of aesthetic qualities and as a result ill- equipped to explain their function in appreciation. Let us see whether Sibley’s further account of the logical relations into which aesthetic qualities enter can illuminate matters. Two sorts of cases validate Sibley’s non-condition-governed claim. First, any set of non-aesthetic qualities that we might cite in attributing a particular aesthetic quality might just as plausibly support a conflicting attribution. Returning to our example, something pink, curvilinear, and filigreed might well be delicate. But Sibley cautions us that features characteristically associated with, for example, delicacy do not guarantee the presence of that trait.14 That same trio of perceptible features—being pink, curvilinear, and filigreed— could render a work not delicate but instead insipid, or anemic, or bland. Sibley’s carefully crafted examples make the incompatibility clear by offering up candidate qualities with seemingly different evaluative force. More often than not, we approve of delicacy, but find insipid, or anemic, or bland works to be wanting. Thus the decision whether a given motif, passage, or entire work is delicate or insipid is of considerable moment and can shape both interpretation and evaluation. Sibley presents a second set of examples where the ascription of aesthetic qualities is not shifted in value but cancelled entirely. In these cases the connection that ordinarily obtains between a set of non-aesthetic qualities and a resulting aesthetic quality is undermined by the presence of an additional trait incompatible with that outcome. To slightly edit Sibley’s explanation, “other features may be enough to outweigh those which, on their own, would render the aesthetic term . . . applicable” (6).15 Alan Goldman gives the example of a Mozart theme—a clear candidate for the verdict “elegant”—interrupted by hyena cries. The expected elegance is defeated.16 And once again employing our example of the pink, filigreed, and curvilinear object whose delicacy we anticipate, imagine that it is a vast metallic structure, six stories tall. Delicacy may well be lost. Overall then, for Sibley, base qualities underdetermine the aesthetic character of a work.

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A given quality might contribute to delicacy in one context, but support a competing quality in another. The presence of additional base qualities might cancel ascription of delicacy entirely. And it remains possible for a work to lack any aesthetic character whatsoever. These variations demonstrate that aesthetic qualities do not contribute to appreciation in a mechanical, algorithmic way. Yet clearly Sibley thinks they are important; the terms he uses to describe their employment—taste, and perceptiveness— are laudatory. Presumably we look those who can who can discern such qualities for aesthetic guidance, and their advice includes reasoning and argumentation in which the attribution of aesthetic qualities figures. In the following sections I will canvas some alternative accounts of these notions that might supplement the understanding we have gleaned from Sibley.

Ae sTheTiC QuALiTie s: C ompeTing C onsTruAL s Despite the wealth of discussion generated by Sibley’s seminal article, he doesn’t do much to specify the nature of aesthetic qualities. And we have noted the possibility that his exposition is viciously circular: aesthetic qualities are those discerned by people with taste; who are people with taste? those capable of discerning aesthetic qualities. A different approach is taken by theorists like Göran Hermerén, Alan Goldman, and Noël Carroll. They offer us robust taxonomies embracing a wide variety of aesthetic quality types. Goldman identifies eight distinct varieties of aesthetic qualities and offers examples of each in his 1995 book Aesthetic Value. Here is his list: (1) value qualities (beautiful, ugly, sublime, dreary); (2) formal qualities (balanced, graceful, concise, loosely woven); (3) emotion qualities (sad, angry, joyful, serene); (4) evocative qualities (powerful, stirring, amusing, hilarious, boring); (5) behavioral qualities (sluggish, bouncy, jaunty); (6) representational qualities (realistic, distorted, true to life, erroneous); (7) second-order perceptual qualities (vivid, dull, muted, steely, mellow), and, finally; (8) historical qualities (derivative, original, daring, bold, conservative) (17). Carroll also offers a varied catalog of types of aesthetic qualities in his 1999 primer Philosophy of Art. He recognizes two types of expressive properties (emotion, character) as well as three varieties of nonanthromorphic properties (gestalt, taste, reaction). Carroll’s illustrative examples are as follows: (1) emotion qualities (somber, melancholic, gay); (2) character qualities (bold, stately, pompous); (3) gestalt qualities (unified, balanced, tightly knit, chaotic); (4) taste qualities (gaudy, vulgar, kitschy, garish); and (5) reaction qualities (sublime, beau-

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tiful, comic, suspenseful).17 The value of both his system and Goldman’s is that they indicate the dizzying variety of aesthetic qualities— qualities essential to artworks’ fulfilling their varied functions. Goldman’s and Carroll’s taxonomies overlap in various ways. Each recognizes the category of emotion properties; Carroll’s reaction properties mirror Goldman’s evocative qualities, and his gestalt properties align pretty closely with Goldman’s formal qualities; finally, there is considerable overlap between Carroll’s character qualities and Goldman’s behavioral qualities. One distinction that applies to both systems is that between thick versus thin properties. Thick properties convey both evaluative and descriptive information, while thin properties are evaluative only. Thus “delicate,” “pompous,” and “serene” are instances of thick aesthetic properties while “worthy,” “excellent,” and “good” would instead be classed as thin properties.18 Nick Zangwill draws an equivalent distinction when he contrasts substantive with verdictive properties, as does Robert Stecker when he opposes specific value properties to general value properties.19 My interest lies with thick aesthetic qualities, as I believe they are importantly in play in the course of appreciation. Even in cases where appreciators first ascribe some sort of overall meaning or significance to a work, interpretive differences will be supported by ascription of differing aesthetic qualities. And so aesthetic qualities are “where the action is” in the sense that disputes about them frequently ground interpretive and evaluative quarrels. Returning to Goldman’s and Carroll’s lists, consider the extensive set of aesthetic properties that critics—as well as any and all appreciators with taste— can ascribe to works of art. There is nothing automatic or mechanical about this process. For example, pondering the form of a painting, a poem, or a sonata does not involve the rote application of what Goldman deems formal qualities. Noticing the receding diagonals in a Poussin landscape, the rhyme scheme of a Shakespeare sonnet, or the overlapping motifs in a Bach fugue are all instances of recognizing form. But they don’t seem to require special taste or perceptiveness. I believe that Sibley would characterize these observations as reports of non-aesthetic properties of the works in question. But a critic who goes on to deem the receding paths inviting, the imperfect rhymes arresting, the fugal interplay intricate, would have shifted to aesthetic terrain.20 Our critic might also attribute emotion properties to these works, finding mystery and gloom in the far reaches of the landscape, steadfast love in the sonnet, and cheer in the initial statement of the fugue. Attributing such properties to these works fur-

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thers our expressive understanding of them, acknowledging their capacity to move us and to represent aspects of our emotional lives. Character (Carroll) or behavioral (Goldman) qualities can also be ascribed to these works. Such attributions are instances of personification. Our facility and comfort with this trope are evidenced by our willingness to apply it liberally. Since wines and melodies provide especially rich soil for personification, consider this exercise. Return to those oenophiles we visited in chapter 2, or to music critics eager to characterize the building blocks of a work, and try to invent examples too preposterous to take hold. The most extravagant descriptions can seem plausible: an unassuming chardonnay, a pretentious merlot, a forthright melody, a diffident refrain. In each case, the proposed personification applies on the basis of a work’s non-aesthetic and other aesthetic properties. Thus it involves the sort of dependence set out in the discussion of supervenience in the previous section, and attributions would be justified by citing the underlying properties that support the characterization. The situation is a little more straightforward with Goldman’s evocative qualities, Carroll’s reaction set. These are present only if the works bring about changes in us, and this is easy to test. We become tense watching a suspenseful movie, bored reading a tedious novel, amused listening to a funny stand-up routine, curious pondering an intriguing conversation piece (a type of group portrait in vogue in the eighteenth century). Controversy regarding this family of terms arises in comparing appreciators who do, and those who do not, have the requisite reactions. Should we privilege the reactions most commonly shared, as these represent the norm? Or should we elevate uncommon reactions, those informed by special expertise? Our treatment of color vision follows the first model, our respect for connoisseurship exemplifies the second.21 The dependencies on which Goldman’s representational and historical qualities rest take us beyond the immediate locus of judgment and attention. Representational qualities are attributed as a result of comparing works to the world, while historical qualities apply when works are measured against their predecessors. Both cases involve an evaluative assessment, not just simple observation or a toting up of commonalities, and both require considerable background knowledge. One must understand the limitations of various media in order to judge representational success, and one must grasp the prior history of the relevant art(s) in order to judge originality. Rounding out the set, Goldman’s second- order perceptual qualities (vivid, steely, mellow, etc.) involve evaluations conveyed by

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what we might be tempted to classify as dead metaphors. They indicate a manner in which certain more basic properties appear to obtain.

meTAphor And C ompLexiT y I have tried to show the applicability of Goldman’s and Carroll’s schemas to the analysis of works of art. Both systems might be considered friendly amendments to Sibley’s original characterization of the aesthetic, as they propose subdivisions of the category without imposing any restrictions that go counter to Sibley’s originating conditions. In what follows I examine whether this enlarged notion of aesthetic qualities can ground the role they play in criticism and appreciation. I believe that a number of problems and complications remain. Consider first the role of metaphor. Metaphor is prevalent when we talk about art. Sibley calls our attention to the fact that many aesthetic terms apply metaphorically: “Clearly, when we employ words as aesthetic terms we are often making and using metaphors, pressing into service words which do not primarily function in this manner” (2). For a start, any attribution of expressive qualities to works of art—sad poems, angry paintings—is literally false and thus a figurative claim. These are instances of personification since human emotions are attributed to inanimate or abstract objects. The familiarity of many such remarks suggests that in addition these should count as dead metaphors. Metaphor can also generate more original and more complex assessments of particular works. Consider Marianne Moore’s remark that the poetry of  Ezra Pound exhibits “ambidextrous precision” or Robert Hughes’s assessment of David Salle: “His line has all the verve of chewed string.” Finally, metaphorical assessments can be considerably more elaborate than these last two pithy summations. In a chapter on aesthetic qualities, Noël Carroll chides aestheticians for focusing on overly simple examples. He argues that theorists need to accommodate such claims as “the movie King Kong is expressive of mid-century brashness, naivete, and sentimentality” and “the poem expresses late nineteenth-century fin- de-siècle, bohemian anarchistic despair and loathing.”22 Granted, Carroll’s constructions seem a bit over the top. But I believe both would land in Goldman’s expressive category, as they ascribe complex emotional content to the works in question. Let me offer one last real-life example—the poet and critic Dan Chiasson notes that late in his career, W. S. Merwin began “writing poems that sounded as though they had been discovered on papyri preserved in earth-

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enware jars.”23 Chiasson’s image characterizes an entire portion of the poet’s opus, and he delivers his assessment via a striking trope. Both this example and the second from Carroll characterize literary works. Literature is an outlier in many respects when it comes to aesthetic theorizing. In particular, problems arise when we try to determine what count as aesthetic qualities in literature and how they are discerned. I will return to this case in my closing chapter where I survey some applications of the view I set out and defend. For now, let me dismiss a possible objection. Some might complain that my latest metaphorical examples apply to entire works or even to entire oeuvres. Thus they function like summary interpretations and invoke the multiplicity one might expect at that level. I would insist that these elaborate tropes specify aesthetic qualities nonetheless. Such qualities can apply locally, regionally, or in summary fashion. And because they remain non-condition-governed in Sibley’s sense, that is, because there are no sufficient conditions for their application, they remain the first site of aesthetic contestation. Although I will use this Sibleyesque example of aesthetic disagreement—“It’s delicate,” “No, it’s insipid”—as my stalking horse throughout much of this book, I draw two important morals from our discussion of metaphor. First, aesthetic qualities (and thus the nature and structure of first- order aesthetic disputes) can be much more complex than this simple oppositional pair suggests; and second, discerning and describing such qualities can require both skill and art. Novice appreciators often rely on the insights of others here. This is nicely illustrated by a paean from Lev Grossman’s review of James Wood’s 2008 book How Fiction Works. He writes: “Wood’s enthusiasm is glorious. Reading alongside him is like going birding with somebody who has better binoculars than yours and is willing to share.”24 Grossman’s simile effectively illuminates one way critics can come to our aid. They catch sight of things— distant birds in Grossman’s trope, non-obvious aesthetic qualities in the case of art appreciation—that the rest of us might miss. Sibley himself addresses this matter in a later, less frequently discussed section of his paper. He proposes seven ways in which critics can call appreciators’ attention to aesthetic qualities they might otherwise have overlooked. Sibley’s list includes: “(1) We may simply mention or point out non-aesthetic features. . . . By drawing attention to [these] . . . we often succeed in bringing someone to see these aesthetic qualities. . . . (2) On the other hand we often simply mention the very qualities we want people to see. . . . (3) Most often, there is a linking of remarks about aesthetic and non-aesthetic features. . . .

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(4) We do, in addition, often make extensive and helpful use of similes and genuine metaphors. . . . (5) We make use of contrasts, comparisons, and reminiscences. . . . (6) Repetition and reiteration often play an important role. . . . (7) Finally, besides our verbal performances, the rest of our behavior is important. We accompany our talk with appropriate tones of voice, expression, nods, looks gestures” (18–19). It is easy to imagine situations in which each of these modes of critical help might come into play. Discerning the aesthetic qualities possessed by works of art is an essential part of appreciation, and experienced critics can guide our recognition. Just who counts as a bona fide critic is a topic taken up in chapters 3 through 6.

Three ou TLier s: ZAngwiLL , eATon, gAu T Before moving on, it seems only right to acknowledge some accounts of aesthetic qualities that depart quite radically from Sibley’s model. I will briefly describe three such schemes, put forward by the philosophers Nick Zangwill, Marcia Eaton, and Berys Gaut, and suggest that none of their accounts can appropriately supplement or replace the understanding of aesthetic qualities we have pieced together to date. Nick Zangwill enthusiastically embraces the aesthetic/non-aesthetic divide and employs it centrally in his definition of art. Zangwill begins his 1995 paper “The Creative Theory of Art” by positing a distinction between aesthetic and non-aesthetic properties.25 He takes the distinction to be relatively unproblematic. For Zangwill, aesthetic qualities come in two varieties, substantive and verdictive, corresponding to my distinction between thick and thin aesthetic terms. Moreover, Zangwill believes that aesthetic properties supervene on non-aesthetic properties and he takes this to be a strong dependence relation, one that involves “the existence of necessities running from non-aesthetic to aesthetic properties” (307). Thus Zangwill, unlike Sibley, acknowledges condition-governedness in this realm. In particular, he claims that the presence of certain non-aesthetic properties can be a sufficient condition for the presence of a corresponding aesthetic property: “If something instantiates an aesthetic property, it instantiates some nonaesthetic property which is sufficient for the instantiation of the aesthetic property” (307). Zangwill explicitly includes semantic and representational properties in the non-aesthetic set; he circles back later to add in relational and intrinsic properties as well (307, 313). These additions to the supervenience base are necessary to flag the contextual variability in play.

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For now let me indicate the work to which Zangwill puts the aesthetic/ non-aesthetic distinction we have been exploring in this chapter. It grounds his definition of art, which he states as follows at the outset of his paper: “Something is a work of art if and only if someone had an insight that certain aesthetic properties would be determined by certain nonaesthetic properties; and because of this, the thing was intentionally endowed with the aesthetic properties in virtue of the nonaesthetic properties as envisaged in the insight” (307). The bulk of Zangwill’s paper is devoted to reflecting on the conditions under which this creative process occurs and formulating a set of subsidiary conditions ensuring that the process unfolds appropriately— guided by artistic intention, successfully achieved, implemented through non-deviant causal chains, and so on. This results in a fuller five-part statement of Zangwill’s theory of art: (1) Someone has the insight that certain aesthetic properties would be determined by certain nonaesthetic properties. (2) Someone intends to realize those aesthetic properties in the object or event by realizing those nonaesthetic properties in the object or event. (3) The intention was caused in the right way by the insight. (4) The aesthetic properties of the object or event are in fact determined by the nonaesthetic properties of the object or event. (5) The aesthetic properties, which are determined by the nonaesthetic properties, were caused in the right way by the person who intended to realize the aesthetic properties by realizing the nonaesthetic properties. (311–12) Zangwill is surely an outlier in the aesthetic world with regard to his unalloyed confidence in the viability of an aesthetic/non-aesthetic distinction and his willingness to construct an entire theory on this foundation. I suspect some consider his theory to be utterly loony. At the very least, Zangwill posits logical relations between non-aesthetic and aesethetic properties that Sibley has given us reason to question. I don’t think Zangwill expects artists to explicitly master the definition of supervenience—a hard enough concept for professional philosophers to wrap their heads around. So on his view, an artist trying to paint a delicate passage needn’t first formulate the proposition that being pink, curvilinear, and filigreed suffices for being delicate and then doggedly set about constructing the requisite subvening array. But she might instinctively create a figure with these traits to achieve her goal of creating a delicate passage, or perhaps

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an entirely delicate work. Empirical investigation might help determine whether artistic creativity follows the pattern that Zangwill proposes. We could inspect the work of (living) artists and ask them why they chose to incorporate the non-aesthetic qualities that, on analysis, support the ascription of the aesthetic qualities in play. Note that researchers would have to have a working version of the aesthetic/non-aesthetic distinction to even design such a study. Thus to corroborate his theory, or to just fully explain it, it would appear that Zangwill must respond to criticisms that have been leveled regarding the aesthetic/non-aesthetic distinction and the supervenience relation.26 There remain other outliers in the aesthetic community. Let me mention two additional theorists who characterize aesthetic qualities in ways not indebted to Sibley’s groundbreaking 1959 paper. In a book appearing thirty years later and a subsequent series of papers, Marcia Eaton defines aesthetic qualities as intrinsic features of objects that are culturally identified as features worthy of attention.27 Eaton differs with Sibley et al. in two respects. First, she insists that aesthetic qualities are culture bound.28 She starts with the intuition that people from different cultures can rightly disagree about the aesthetic qualities possessed by a given work. This assumption, in and of itself, effectively eliminates any possibility for supervenience. Recall that the definition of that relation states that there can be no difference in supervening properties without a corresponding difference in the set of subvening base properties. Consider two indistinguishable vases that are both delicate. A supporter of supervenience would insist that one of the vases cannot lose that aesthetic property unless we alter it to change the array of non-aesthetic properties. By contrast, Eaton would allow that one and the same vase— or two identical vases— could be delicate to one observer but not delicate to another from a culture that construes or values delicacy differently, or perhaps even lacks a term coextensive with that label. Eaton’s suggestion immediately invites concerns about boundary issues. If aesthetic ascriptions can properly vary from culture to culture, how are we to identify and individuate cultures? Elsewhere Eaton tells us “I use the terms ‘culture,’ ‘subculture,’ and ‘community’ interchangeably to refer to groups of individuals who are aware of a connection to others in the group and are expected to take some responsibility for one another.”29 But the following elucidation hardly closes off the ontological questions in play: “Within the contemporary United States there is a plurality of microcultures—rural, urban, black, Hispanic, white, Eastern, Midwest-

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ern, and many more. Even families and small groups of friends qualify as subcultures or minicommunities, and they often develop their own aesthetic traditions. That is, they come to value certain special sets of intrinsic properties.”30 The second feature that sets Eaton’s account apart from those we have been considering is her insistence that aesthetic qualities are intrinsic features of works. This means that they are features to which we must perceptually or reflectively attend. I take it reflection is added to the definition (“a property worthy of attention [i.e., of perception or reflection],” INNA, p.  391) to accommodate arts like literature, whose aesthetic properties can include aspects of plot and character that are not accessed through visual perception alone. Eaton admits that such attention must sometimes be supplemented with background information that cannot be read off directly from the work. She offers this example: to know that a painting represents Aunt Mabel (an aesthetic property), viewers must know what Mabel looked like in addition to seeing what is on the canvas. As Eaton explains, “One must rely on extrinsic information in order to know that something represents Aunt Mabel— one can’t know just by looking unless one also knows who Aunt Mabel is” (INNA, p. 391). But one must do some looking as well; to appreciate the representational properties of the painting, one must take them in visually. It won’t do to base one’s appreciation of this aspect entirely on the testimony of others. Note the extraordinary permissiveness that Eaton’s definition ushers in. Driven by a sense that very simple sensory qualities can and should be counted as aesthetic qualities, Eaton has constructed her definition to bring this about. In particular, she is insistent that colors should play this role. The color yellow comes up frequently in her exposition. And she supports her autobiographical declaration—“I have always been puzzled by the fact that many theorists assume that color statements are not aesthetic” (INNA, p. 386)—with the following examples of what she deems aesthetic appreciation: “I like that shade of green that permeates the world the first few weeks of spring” and “It’s the red that is so dramatic” (presumably said of a work of visual art) (INNA, p. 386). Eaton offers further examples of simple sensory properties that can attain aesthetic status when she suggests that on occasion loudness can be deemed an aesthetic quality in music as can speed— e.g., slow motion—in video.31 To demonstrate the final form of her view, Eaton presents an exercise that is meant to determine when supervenience relations obtain. It reads as follows:

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TEST: If one can imagine two objects or events identical in all respects except that one has property P and the other does not have property P, then P is not supervenient; if one cannot imagine two objects or events identical in all respects except that one has property P and the other does not have property P, then P is supervenient. (INNA, p. 388) Eaton then challenges readers to try out the test in the case of two coffee mugs exactly alike in all respect but one. She considers candidate differences and suggests that none suitably fills the role of supervenience. That is, while we can properly imagine that one coffee mug was owned by Queen Elizabeth without cancelling out the pair’s posited indiscernibility, Eaton also believes that this can be done with alleged aesthetic qualities like delicacy: “I can easily imagine two mugs identical in all respects except that one is delicate according to Dick but not according to Jane” (INNA, p. 389). If this is the case, then delicacy does not supervene. In such circumstances, supervenience can be maintained only if certain relational or structural properties are added to the base set on which the alleged aesthetic properties depend. Two such examples Eaton offers are “made in the sixteenth century” and “seen by Jane” (Merit, p. 39); the first explains the Queen’s ownership while the second sets up a contrast with “seen by Dick.” Eaton later expands on this elaboration to allow a trio of possibilities “the background of the viewer, the century of production, or community traditions” (40). That is, when two perceptually indistinguishable objects that differ in one (or more) of these respects are viewed by informed appreciators, they may appropriately ascribe incompatible aesthetic properties, as may one appreciator viewing a given object at different times. Both possibilities violate the definition of supervenience unless the requirements for the supervenience base are broadened to include relational properties of this sort. Despite any fixes we may put in place, I believe that Eaton’s account greatly gerrymanders the domain of the aesthetic. Given her permissiveness regarding the identity and individuation of cultures as well as the looseness of the notion that a culture finds a certain property worthy of attention, there seems no limit to what might count as an aesthetic property. Let me more briefly mention one last theory that seems similarly permissive and similarly outside of Sibley’s orbit. In his book Art, Emotion and Ethics, Berys Gaut defends what he calls an artistic theory of the aesthetic.32 Basically, for Gaut aesthetic properties are any and all properties that support attributions of value to a work of art. He encapsulates the view

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as follows: “The aesthetic properties of W are W’s evaluative properties that have aesthetic value (that is, that give W its value qua work of art).”33 I actually find another author’s summation of the theory clearer than Gaut’s own. In his article “Recent Approaches to Aesthetic Experience,” Carroll offers the following precis of Gaut’s position: “something is an aesthetic property of a work if it is the sort of feature that would figure in a critical evaluation of the work as a work of art.”34 Gaut goes on to distinguish those aesthetic properties that can also be possessed by natural objects from those that can only be possessed by works of art and suggests that “the notion of the aesthetic has its primary application to works of art” (35). It is hard to determine just how permissive Gaut’s definition might be without working through particular examples of art criticism and seeing the range of considerations offered in arguments assessing specific works. Gaut does, however, offer an analogy from the world of business (!) that indicates the range of the set of aesthetic qualities. He notes that traits like having disciplined work habits and being a good communicator are “relevant to evaluating someone qua businessman” though they aren’t part of the definition of “businessman.”35 Applied to the realm of art, this analogy suggests that the set of factors we recruit to evaluate works of art might far outpace the set that determines any given piece’s art status. Therefore, unless we can rule out as aberrant certain instantiations of the formula “It is a worthy work of art because ________________,” then any sort of consideration can play the functional role that, for Gaut, identifies aesthetic qualities. Gaut does want to set some limits to what reasons can count here. For example, he notes that we would be left baffled were someone to claim that “the tragedy is good in part because it involves ten characters and lasts two hours” (36). However, he doesn’t say what hurdles should be put in place to sort baffling (and presumably unacceptable) from acceptable reasons in support of aesthetic evaluation. And later Gaut explicitly allows that on his theory, “some ethical and cognitive qualities of art actually are, under certain conditions, aesthetic qualities of art” (40). Thus they figure in evaluations. I conclude that his construal of aesthetic qualities is, from the start, an extraordinarily generous one. I have closed my exposition with Zangwill’s, Eaton’s, and Gaut’s relatively radical proposals. All three authors ring changes on received philosophical views of the aesthetic. While Zangwill acknowledges dependency relations that Sibley called into question, both Eaton and Gaut understand aesthetic properties so broadly as to include almost any and all properties

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of a work. Perhaps not coincidentally, both are particularly eager to pursue parallels between aesthetics and ethics. It is tempting to understand aesthetic properties on analogy with moral properties for a number of reasons. For a start, the analogy takes hold because both seem to supervene on more basic qualities—perceptual qualities in the aesthetic case, natural qualities in the moral case. In addition, both seem to be candidate examples of the metaphysical category of tertiary qualities, and both sustain rigorous debates about realism. And finally, as a practical matter, the analogy might seem helpfully labor-saving for aestheticians, as philosophers have devoted so much attention to the moral case. That said, let me note one striking disanalogy between these two realms—the absence of experts on the moral side. I don’t deny that we have, and seek, moral exemplars. But I don’t believe that we acknowledge, let alone credential, those among us who are experts in living. Yet expertise is of the essence in the world of art. And theorists engage in lively debate regarding the traits that make one an authoritative appreciator of art. We consciously seek out critics whose taste we share in order to make informed aesthetic choices. Their critical pronouncements are available in a variety of modalities and serve as practical guides to behavior and choice. Some might interject that religious figures serve as exemplars and religious texts like the Bible as codes of conduct. I would prefer to keep morality and religion apart for the purposes of this discussion. In general, I believe that moral instruction arrives through more varied and more diffuse channels—the role models and training provided by parents, the exhortations offered by teachers, the pronouncements and misadventures of peers, even, if Martha Nussbaum is to be believed, the pages of fiction (and, by extension, narratives on the silver screen)—than the practical advice that shapes our interactions with art. We aspire to self-realization when it comes to living our lives, but in the realm of art, we are encouraged to seek out others to whom to defer. So the notion of expertise is all important here. In the chapters that follow, I will develop and defend an account of what makes for a worthy advisor about the arts.

roberT sTeCker’s su sTAined CriTiQue of Ae sTheTiC QuALiTie s A more trenchant objection might be raised at this point, namely, that aesthetic qualities have not been adequately characterized by the discussion to date. The border between aesthetic and non-aesthetic cases

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remains permeable if we employ Sibleyesque taste or perceptiveness to draw the distinction, while the more radical proposals we have just canvased threaten to obliterate the distinction altogether. As we have already seen, we seem fully able to wield some aesthetic terms without special knowledge or skill, for example, in claiming that an Irish jig is sprightly, while perceptiveness seems required for the attribution of some nonaesthetic terms, for example, in deeming a particular cabernet overpriced. Present- day philosophers disagree about the prospects for remedy. In this section, I will examine the sustained critique of aesthetic qualities marshalled by Robert Stecker in his primer Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art. I read him as conceding at the end that we must perhaps rest content with an imperfect account of this terrain. I am happy to join him in this resting place. Stecker raises several cogent objections to the aesthetic/non-aesthetic distinction. The first is a worry about whether particular aesthetic terms apply univocally across the arts. Stecker rightly asks “Is there a single property, being vivid, that is possessed by foliage in the autumn, paintings, musical passages, and character portrayals in plays or novels?” Focusing on portrayals, he notes that “one portrayal may be vivid because of the great quantity of visualizable descriptions it provides. Another . . . because of a single, salient, powerful image it offers” (65– 66). A bit later, he lays out four quite different ways in which the portrayal of a literary character might be vivid.36 Such cross-modal uses of aesthetic terms challenge our ability to provide what logicians call real definitions— definitions that capture a common essence ascribed in each case. Problems arise not only when we consider the range of applications of terms like “vivid,” but also when we contrast aesthetic and non-aesthetic uses of terms that can live a double life, designating aesthetic qualities in some contexts and non-aesthetic qualities in others. Noël Carroll called attention to this fact when he cited the example of “powerful,” attributed both to a locomotive and to a painting. Stecker suggests that all expressive and behavioral and most second- order perceptual and representational terms function in this manner, that is, they can have both aesthetic and non-aesthetic uses (60). Consider the terms “sad,” “brash,” “dull,” and “distorted” for an example from each category. Each can function as an aesthetic term—picking out a sad poem, a brash balletic sequence, a dull subsidiary plot, a distorted painted portrait. But each can also figure in non-aesthetic claims—a sad child, a brash investment proposal, a dull silver spoon, a distorted reflection in a cracked mirror. What changes with

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the aesthetic use, and is a different degree of taste or perceptiveness required in those cases? Stecker divides aesthetic properties into three classes— general value, specific value, and purely descriptive. The third category is required to accommodate properties with no accompanying valence. For instance, deeming a work sad, or bold, or muted, conveys no immediate indication of its worth, so these formulations would count as purely descriptive uses of these terms. This connects with the issue we were just examining. The problem is simply sharpened; the question becomes on what grounds can we sort aesthetic uses of a term that carries no implicit evaluation from non-aesthetic uses of that same term? Stecker acknowledges that his account “doesn’t tell us what makes one purely descriptive property aesthetic and another, also appearing at the same level of explanation, nonaesthetic” (63). He temporizes that “it is best at this point to live with this vagueness in the distinction between aesthetic and nonaesthetic properties” until further issues are investigated (65). But this inherent vagueness tells against a realist interpretation of the distinction. Stecker calls our attention to one final worry. It flows from differences in appreciators’ responses rather than from differences in properties perceived. At issue is how to handle variation if we include response dependency in the explication of aesthetic terms. A property is responsedependent for Stecker “if its instantiation in an object consists in the object having a steady disposition to bring about a certain reaction in human beings” (64). It is tempting to tie aesthetic properties to the reactions of a special subset of appreciators, those who count as ideal observers. After proposing a list of requisite skills, Stecker characterizes this group as follows: “An ideal observer is simply a normal observer with these additional skills: a suitably skilled normal observer” (65). The skills Stecker enumerates— an ability to discriminate finely, background knowledge, familiarity with the comparison class for the type of object under appreciation, ability to see connections and draw inferences, and freedom from bias—are drawn from Hume’s treatment of ideal critics that will be examined in chapter 3. Unfortunately, even when we confine our attention to the reactions of this rarified group, we cannot assume these will be uniform. In particular, Stecker believes that individual variation makes a response- dependent analysis problematic for both the specific value and purely descriptive cases. Different observers might judge such properties differently, as might a single observer encountering a given property at different times. Pushed for this reason toward a non-realist account of aesthetic properties, Stecker en-

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dorses a sophisticated subjectivism that takes appreciators’ aesthetic appraisals to be about their own experience rather than about objective properties. He deems the view sophisticated because it allows us to sort valid from invalid aesthetic claims based on whether proper viewing conditions were obtained, relevant non-aesthetic properties were acknowledged, and so on. But it remains a resolutely nonrealist view. I will return to the issue of response dependency and attempt to define and defend a qualified form of realism after laying out some of the requisite machinery in chapter 5.37 The philosopher Anna Bergqvist has written about aesthetic qualities in setting out an aesthetic version of the moral particularism she has elsewhere defended.38 Her discussion vindicates a number of claims made in this chapter. Bergqvist attempts to resolve the quandries posed by thick aesthetic properties by separating out two key relations in which they are enmeshed. Referring to the justificatory structure cited at the start of this chapter, aesthetic qualities can be understood, first, as supervening on a set of non-aesthetic qualities—their “downward” tracking genealogy— and also as contributing to aesthetic verdicts (what I have called summary evaluations)—their “upward” tracking influence. Bergqvist attends separately to these two aspects of thick concepts in use. Her treatment is difficult as she engages with current debates in other philosophical fields. But let me note a few points that highlight the role aesthetic qualities play in appreciation and critical debate. Bergqvist imports the term “shapelessness” to flag the challenge inherent in the lower part of the justificatory pyramid. There is not a predictable set of non-aesthetic features that entails (guarantees) the presence of a higher-level aesthetic quality. This is the fact Sibley flagged by deeming such qualities non-condition-governed. Supporting Sibley, Bergqvist suggests that taste is required for the attribution of such qualities precisely because there is no entailment. We can effectively explore this issue by setting out some of the components of taste and seeing how they function in context. I will begin this process in the next chapter where I present and endorse David Hume’s portrait of ideal critics. Bergqvist ascribes a different challenge, variability, to the upper part of the justificatory pyramid. This is the likelihood that appreciators will like different things and thus offer incompatible verdicts. Since I am interested above all in defending realism about aesthetic properties, and believe it need not be threatened by cases where critics acknowledge the same properties yet evaluate them differently, I will discount the challenges to realism that arise from the upward trajectory. However, I believe the structure

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Bergqvist suggests allows us to partition Stecker’s objections. His first two complaints about the functioning of aesthetic qualities can be addressed by attending to the context of judgment—the circumstances framing the appreciator’s encounter with a work of art. By contrast, Stecker’s third complaint (the failure of supervenience, which contributes to what Bergqvist labels variability) has to do more with the appreciators themselves, their stock of knowledge, their previous experiences with art, and so on. This variability is most profitably addressed by assessing the appreciators offering evaluations and proposing restrictions on their suitability for that task. I will discuss context in the remainder of this chapter, but will delay an account of suitability until chapter 5 when some required principles and distinctions are in place.

ArT worLd s, C on TexT s, CATeg orie s There is one important dimension to our interactions with art that I have neglected so far. That is the contribution of context to determining both what is art and what if any aesthetic properties are in place. The history of western philosophy has provided a number of essentialist answers to the question “What is art?” We are told that art is imitation (Plato, Aristotle), expression (Collingwood, Croce), significant form (Bell), communication (Tolstoy). This arc changed significantly after the appearance of Maurice Mandelbaum’s 1965 paper “Family Resemblances and Generalization Concerning the Arts.”39 Mandelbaum there critiqued Wittgenstein’s famous ‘family resemblance’ account of the meaning of general terms. Taking as his example the word “game,” Wittgenstein had suggested that while there is no set of essential qualities possessed by all and only games, any two games considered pairwise will have some traits in common. Thus badminton and tennis have rackets and nets, soccer and rugby have balls and fields, hockey and football have teams and goals, Candyland and chess have boards and pieces, cribbage and bridge have cards and running scores, Cowboys and Indians and Russian Roulette have guns and casualties—some real, some make-believe. Since Wittgenstein believed that family members resemble one another in similarly loose fashion, he borrowed the phrase “family resemblance” to characterize the linguistic phenomenon, the grouping of items referred to by a given general term. Mandelbaum chided Wittgenstein for overlooking the underlying cause that bound family members together, namely, their shared genetic her-

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itage. Mandelbaum proposed that other categories labelled by general terms were joined in similar fashion. He suggested they were united by the possession of non-manifest shared properties, just as family members are united by their common gene pool. Accordingly Mandelbaum characterized games in terms of their potential “to be of absorbing non-practical interest to either participants or spectators,” and he thought that art could be defined by highlighting the relational attribute “having been created by someone for some actual or possible audience” (197, 198).40 Subsequent aestheticians embraced the lesson that Mandelbaum drew from his critique of Wittgenstein. Although they continued to offer essentialist theories, they sought a non-exhibited or non-manifest property common to all works of art in order to craft a unifying account. Preeminent among such theorists was George Dickie. Dickie took Arthur Danto’s passing phrase with its gnomic mention of a realm devoted to art—“To see something as art requires something the eye cannot decry— an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art: an artworld”41—and ran with it, proposing and defending an Institutional Theory of Art. Dickie fleshed out the notion of an artworld and encouraged us to attend to the framing factors—attitudes and institutions—that shape our treatment of candidate works. His initial definition read as follows: “A work of art in the classificatory sense is (1) an artifact (2) a set of the aspects of which has had conferred upon it the status of a candidate for appreciation by some person or persons acting on behalf of a certain social institution (the artworld).”42 The radical elements of Dickie’s theory were his posit of an artworld and his emphasis on acquired status. Being a work of art emerges as a relational property on this view. Within a given artworld, appreciators’ attitudes toward and treatment of objects and events confer the relevant status. Initially Dickie proposed a formal institution made up of assorted subsystems, one for each candidate art (painting, sculpture, poetry, literature, theatre, film, dance, architecture, etc., etc.), as well as a varied group of artworld personnel (artists, critics, curators, teachers, directors, conductors, students, and more). But he eventually scaled back his claims to appease opponents clamoring that no such arrangement existed. Critics of his theory pointed out that institutions shaping public life—marriage, religion, education, and more—are rigidly structured, yet there is no comparable apparatus specifying artworld roles, rules, and procedures. Dickie eventually produced a modified version of his theory according to which

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the artworld operates as an informal practice rather than a formal institution. He offered the following revised definition: “A work of art is an artifact of a kind created to be presented to an artworld public.”43 Of course, the crucial feature of Dickie’s theory—the artworld—is subject to just the sort of boundary problems we explored in considering Eaton’s culturally driven account of aesthetic properties. It seems clear that eighteenth- century Japan, nineteenth- century Paris, and present- day Manhattan constitute markedly different artworlds. But what about early versus late Ukiyo- e, nineteenth- century Paris versus the French countryside in that same era, present- day NYC versus present- day LA? We might demarcate art-worlds with differing degrees of fine-grainedness depending on what work we wanted the concept to do. For example, the contrasts just listed might have a much greater bearing on evaluative (good art versus bad art) as opposed to classificatory (art versus non-art) disagreements. But comparing and contrasting more disparate artworlds supports Arthur Danto’s assertion of the “essential historicity” of art.44 The point of his remark was that not everything can be art in all times and all places. Presumably, Joseph Albers’s Homage to the Square canvases could not have achieved art status in New York in the 1860s, nor could Duchamp’s urinal in fifteenth- century Florence, despite the prevalence of smooth white marble statues. While this last example is anachronistic to the point of caricature, it remains the case that items can be works of art in one artworld but not art in others.45 And if this is so, then critical remarks should be relativized accordingly. For example, they might be indexed to the originating artworld of the object in question as a default assumption, and any disparities between the artworld of the critic and that of the work should be noted. While I have just indicated some difficulties that arise when we consider the semantics of the term “artworld,” I believe it remains a useful heuristic, and I will continue to employ it in discussion. Moreover, for our purposes, the most interesting sorts of sorts of context- dependence are those occurring within rather than between artworlds. This is because such “intra-artworld” cases illuminate the striking context dependence of aesthetic properties. Work by two authors points this out. Arthur Danto, the philosopher who coined the term “artworld,” arrived at his vision of art by constructing doppelganger examples inspired by 1960s pop art. What struck Danto was the way that indiscernible objects can fill quite different roles. Contrast a Brillo Box by Andy Warhol with one on the shelves of your local supermarket. The first is a work of art, the second what Danto

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would call a mere real thing. Danto proposes a further difference here: the work of art says something and demands interpretation, while the mere thing is mute. Presumably the art Brillo Box has aesthetic properties—being shocking, being self-referential—that its commercial counterpart lacks. A bravura example that Danto offers along these lines is the set of eight indistinguishable red squares he imagines in the opening chapter of Transfiguration of the Commonplace.46 The first six, all works of art, differ drastically from one another despite being look-alikes. “The Israelites crossing the Red Sea” depicts the famed episode from Exodus, but it captures the moment when the Israelites are safe and their pursuers have drowned.47 “Kierkegaard’s Mood” characterizes to the philosopher’s gloomy assessment of his life in terms of that Biblical incident.48 Exemplars three and four are both titled “Red Square,” but the first is a Moscow landscape while its twin is simply an abstract piece of geometrical art. Painting number five, titled “Nirvana,” alludes to Samsara doctrines of reincarnation while number six, “Red Table Cloth,” pays homage to Matisse. The seventh red square is a fifteenth- century canvas prepared (“grounded in red lead”) but not yet painted and so not yet art, while the eighth is a contemporary painted red surface, a mere artifact with no “art-hood” in its future. Danto’s Red Squares example allows us to link questions about art to questions about aesthetic properties, since the first six paintings, being different works of art, are likely to differ in this regard as well.49 Thus “The Israelites” is ebullient while “Kierkegaard’s Mood” is somber, the second “Red Square” is hard-edged and analytic while “Matisse’s Tablecloth” decadently evokes sun-drenched Moroccan interiors and pleasure-filled days. If a collector bought one of Danto’s six imagined paintings but through some mix-up received one of the other canvases instead, she would have multiple grounds for complaint. Not only would the mix-up alter the value of her portfolio; she would also mistake the work’s meaning and provenance and be on track to misattribute a slew of aesthetic properties to her new purchase. Kendall Walton establishes this important point about the attribution of  aesthetic properties in his much anthologized paper “Categories of Art”: the aesthetic qualities that are properly ascribed to a given work vary according to how that work is categorized. We have already seen how category choices can determine whether an object is art or non-art; compare Warhol’s Brillo Box with one from Procter and Gamble. Walton comes up with a compelling example where one and the same object realizes two quite different works of art depending on how it is categorized. He in-

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vites us to consider the new genre guernicas, which consists of versions of Picasso’s famous painting that vary in their vertical reach. That is, the original painting is for all purposes flat; one would have to stand in front of the actual canvas, now repatriated, to determine the depth of pigment and the degree to which brush strokes are discernible. But imagine a host of variants that build on its outlines in much the way that molded plastic contour maps can be raised to indicate the relative heights of mountain ranges. While we consider Picasso’s painting to exemplify passionate political rhetoric—it is famed as a protest against the horrors of the Spanish Civil War—it is quite tame in the context of the new genre we are invited to imagine. That is, Guernica the painting and Guernica the guernica differ aesthetically. The painting is angry, impassioned, violent, politicized, but the guernica, of necessity judged against a quite different comparison class, is calm, contemplative, retiring, and relaxed. Having indicated the role of context through this example, Walton goes on to pose a truly difficult normative question: for each work of art, is there some one category in which it is correctly perceived? There is not an easy answer. Walton proposes four criteria for category selection: whether the category generates a preponderance of standard features, in his technical sense of that term,50 an aesthetically better work, a work in accord with the artist’s intention, and a work in a category established and recognized in the artist’s society (what we have here been calling his or her artworld) (357). In ordinary circumstances, these criteria align. But we can come up with puzzle cases that pull them apart. Noël Carroll discusses one such example, Ed Wood’s Plan 9 from Outer Space.51 The film is ranked by many among the worst of all time. Carroll asks whether it is right to redeem Plan 9 by reconstruing the hack job as knowingly transgressive and thus visionary. He argues that such an approach is misguided since it conflicts with everything else we know about Wood’s place in the history of film. I believe it remains an open question how we should treat the hard cases where Walton’s proposed criteria pull in different directions. Walton’s third marker, artistic intention, has generated a particularly robust set of controversies, and I won’t wade into the debates concerning competing theories of interpretation. I do take Walton to have definitively established the context- dependence of aesthetic qualities. Thus appreciators in different contexts—where this includes different artworlds but also different standpoints within a given artworld (for example, those of a novice, a feminist critic, a Marxist)— can correctly attribute conflicting and/or incompatible aesthetic properties to one and the same object or to indiscernible

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pairs( or n-tuples) of objects. Let me summarize the insights about aesthetic properties drawn from a number of the authors discussed in this section. Following Mandelbaum, we can note that the aesthetic properties a work possesses are not determined simply by its exhibited or manifest perceptual properties. Per both Dickie and Danto, we can agree that objects may acquire a quite different status when moved between artworlds. And finally, following Walton, we can elaborate these dependencies by acknowledging that the aesthetic properties a work possesses within a given artworld vary with the category in which the work is placed, while adding that category selection is itself a vexed matter since different choices can weight features differently and promote different outcomes.

sidebAr : on reALism in Ae sTheTiC s Before moving on, I want to circle back and assemble assorted observations on realism in aesthetics. Much of what follows builds on points made in this chapter, but some claims will necessarily function as promissory notes, awaiting clarification of a few key items in the chapters that follow. Readers uninterested in metaphysical and epistemic minutiae are welcome to skip this section. At its most basic, realism has to do with what entities we include in our inventory of the world. The list of candidate items is remarkably varied; the following might all clamor for inclusion: rocks, trees, squirrels, people, rivers, rainstorms, weather fronts, ecosystems, stars, planets, gravity, electrons, covenants, corporations, laws, nations, emotions, desires, beliefs, behaviors, and of course, properties of many sorts. Alexander Miller begins his Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry “realism” with this similarly generous observation: “The question of the nature and plausibility of realism arises with respect to a large number of subject matters, including ethics, aesthetics, causation, modality, science, mathematics, semantics, and the everyday world of macroscopic material objects and their properties.” Miller goes on to note that “it is misleading to think that there is a straightforward and clear-cut choice between being a realist and a nonrealist about a particular subject matter. It is rather the case that one can be more-or-less realist about a particular subject matter.” The notion of aesthetic realism comes into play when we consider aesthetic qualities. As noted above, I would like to defend realism as it applies to thick aesthetic qualities but not extend this to summary evaluations such as the claim that a particular work of art is good, or a masterpiece,

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or off-putting, or execrable. I think a shared aesthetic world is sufficiently grounded if we can come to agree about properties of aesthetic and artistic objects yet diverge when it comes to deciding which of those objects we like and how much we value them. Thus I agree with Miller that realism in this domain might be a matter of degree. In threading this needle it is helpful to distinguish realism from its near cognates, objectivism and cognitivism, as well as from such oppositional possibilities as relativism and subjectivism. In her paper “Towards a Reasonable Objectivism for Aesthetic Judgements,” Elisabeth Schellekens defends some of the middle ground laid out by Miller.52 Partitioning matters so that the term “realism” applies to properties, “objectivism” to judgments, she notes that “elements of both realism and anti-realism about aesthetic properties, or objectivism and subjectivism about aesthetic judgements, may have considerable simultaneous appeal” and advocates integrating elements of both into a coherent theory (164, 165). Schellekens then goes on to discuss a pair of mixed views—David Wiggins’s sensible subjectivism and Frank Sibley’s perceptual objectivism—that follow Miller in being more or less realist about the aesthetic domain. Both acknowledge that aesthetic qualities seem to have some purchase in the everyday world while at the same time admitting their essential response-dependent character. Schellekens borrows from the Platonic dialogue the Euthyphro to characterize the tension in play here. Recall that there Socrates asks whether the holy is loved by the gods because it is holy, or instead is it holy because loved by them. The first formulation asserts a realist view of value, the second makes it subjectivist—tied to the response of a specified set of beings. Schellekens illuminates this terrain by critiquing the over-reliance on an analogy with secondary qualities. Judging something to be red and judging it to be graceful recruit quite different stores of competency. Our human perceptual systems seem hard-wired to perceive a certain range of colors; the world seems so hued to creatures like us. But it doesn’t seem right to say that we’re hard-wired to perceive delicacy, grace, and the like. While as I said above, the locus of realism for me is aesthetic properties, a further consequence of realism would seem to be that aesthetic disagreements are resolvable in principle.53 For the fact that a claim is truth apt, or that there is some sort of justificatory framework in place, would seem to promise a procedure for vetting conflicting claims. Here the extensive background knowledge demanded of Humean experts comes into play. Levinson, defending a realist view of aesthetic proper-

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ties, reminds us how response- dependency is cashed out here. Traits of the perceiver matter, but this isn’t limited to our distinctively human perceptual apparatus. An expert’s background knowledge is recruited, where this includes the framing practices, conventions, and institutions that constitute a given artworld. As Levinson notes, “Insofar as the aesthetic attribution is intended as objective, i.e., as a property-attribution, such appearances are relativized to a perceiver who views a work correctly, meaning in particular, one who properly situates a work with respect to its context of origin, including its position in the artist’s oeuvre, its relation to the surrounding culture, and its connections to pre- existing artistic traditions.” 54 Levinson later suggests some boundaries for this situation: “The terms of the relation, in the general case, may just be these three: a work’s lowlevel perceptual properties; a normally constituted perceiver for the sort of work in question; and a set of historically- determined matrices, categories, or frameworks of perception that are ideally internalized by such a perceiver” (353). Thus what counts as a realist view is inscribed by the capabilities and background attributed to Humean critics. These form part of the supervenience base for the ascription of aesthetic properties. Only in clustering and heeding the voices of suitable and well-grounded critics can we effectively determine the properties of contested works. In the chapters that follow, I will do my best to expand on and defend this account of critical competence.

CLo sing C onsiderATions In closing, I perhaps owe skeptical readers an argument for the claim that proper appreciation necessarily requires, or proceeds through, aesthetic qualities. Such an argument is complicated by the fact that I have endorsed messy taxonomies rather than neat, tidy definitions of aesthetic qualities, and given that any quest for a definition of art will result in a similarly messy result. Nonetheless, I believe it is possible to be antiessentialist with regard to the question “what is art?” and generous in the construal of aesthetic qualities, while still showing an inherent connection between appreciation and aesthetic qualities. Let me try to at least sketch an argument for this connection. For me, being antiessentialist about art means acknowledging that works of art can perform many varied functions. They might display beautiful or arresting form, express or arouse emotion, represent and comment on the actual world, create alternate worlds for us to imaginatively enter,

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present moral lessons for us to learn, and more.55 Accordingly, my argument sketch will be keyed to the array of possible functions set out in the pantheon of failed essentialist theories: art as imitation, art as expression, art as significant form, and so on. The first stage in coming to appreciate any candidate work, no matter what its aims or purpose, involves noting what is there—its surface (sensory) properties. But then we inevitably go on and pursue the forms into which they coalesce, the objects they represent, the emotions they express, the narratives they present, the meanings and morals they convey, where each after the first of these items should be qualified with the addition of a parenthetical “if any.” Now I want to claim that this is best achieved in each case by looking to see (I use this word as a placeholder) what aesthetic qualities are there. Set aside what appear to be the hard cases for my argument—formal, conceptual, and socalled anti-aesthetic works. For any others, there will be expressive, representational, symbolic, narrative, etc. connections to discern. And for any of those, something more than a literal acknowledgement of the surface/ sensory properties of the work will be required. That is, there is a certain array of words, or of sounds, or of shapes, or of images, on the basis of which we attribute additional traits.56 We can sort the possible cases in accord with the various (rejected) essentialist theories that populate the history of Western philosophy. Start with Expression theories. These take the business of art to be the expression and/or arousal of emotion. Since works of art are inanimate, and so not literally capable of experiencing emotion, we will be in the realm of metaphor; moreover, almost all of our theorists offer emotion as a subcategory of aesthetic qualities. So this case is an easy one. Some works convey emotion by portraying or describing humans in emotionally expressive states. But abstract works can also convey emotional content by presenting expressive forms (consider the theories of Suzanne Langer) or, in the case, say, of music, by inviting listeners to posit a persona or apparent artist who felt and showed forth those feelings. What of works that fall within the purview of mimetic theories? Here, the shapes, colors, sounds, whatever, will represent something. Sibley suggests taste is not required to determine what is represented. This seems right for some types of content—a woman, a woodland scene—but not for others—the inevitability of war, the compromises of romantic love. Aesthetic qualities in Goldman’s Representation category would apply in each case. But determining the degree of realism would not exhaust our aesthetic interest. In addition to assessing artists’ accuracy and precision, we

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want to know what their works convey about their subjects. Arthur Danto believes that artworks always fulfill this communicative function. In The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, he insists that works of art must be interpretable. He characterizes the artworld as “a world of interpreted things” and claims that for works of art, “esse is interpretari.” 57 Thus for Danto, a representation must say something in order to count as art. Presumably something about the manner of the representation conveys the artist’s thoughts about her subject. To say more about how this happens, we can elide Danto’s account with Roger Scruton’s theory contrasting the representational powers of painting and photography.58 Scruton made much of the fact that paintings bear an intentional, photographs a causal, relation to their subjects. While I think Scruton was mistaken regarding the resources of photography,59 I do accept his posit of the basic intentionality of painting. We can go on to set up a dilemma here. Either painters and photographers are trying to present the world as they see it, or they are trying to alter or exaggerate what is given in perception. Each assessment would have to be properly contextualized. That is, each would be relative to the artist’s individual style, to the limitations of the medium, to the canons of representation in place at the time, and so on. With those qualifications in place, given the first alternative, some of the aesthetic qualities in Goldman’s representational category would apply. Given the second alternative, properly appreciating the work would require acknowledging the degree to which the representation departs from realism, and the effects achieved thereby. For example, appreciating a Pontormo nude, a Max Beckmann portrait, or a de Kooning woman necessarily involves some account of their degree of distortion, the departure from verisimilitude. These effects could, I suggest, best be conveyed via aesthetic qualities—an adverb of manner characterizing the painter’s style and its distance from realistic recording. Thus, Pontormo’s figures are often deemed floating and ambiguous, Beckmann’s canvases jarring and congested, de Kooning’s grimacing women vulgar and aggressive, and these ascribed qualities contribute to our overall understanding of the works.60 What has been said with regard to expression- and imitation-based theories indicates the tack I will take in arguing for the role of aesthetic qualities in the appreciation of formalist works. Here, it might be thought, we need only rest content with descriptive or perceptual features. Consider canvases by Frank Stella, Mark Rothko, or Kenneth Noland, Bach’s collection of Preludes and Fugues, symphonies by Mozart. What compels us to

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ascend from perceptual qualities—adjoining colored stripes, sequentially sounded notes or chords—to the aesthetic qualities they support? Suppose we again accept that these works are saying something, are about something. At the very least, they might be saying, “Look at/consider me!” “I am a beautiful (or striking, or compelling  .  .  .) configuration.” But presumably the works are also, through their creators’ knowledge and intentions, in a dialogue with previous works in their own and other artworlds.61 And unpacking this will inevitably involve us in contemplating figurative and aesthetic claims. For example, one might analyze a Bach Prelude and Fugue via Leonard Meyer’s theory of tension and release and ascribe emotive aesthetic properties accordingly. The hues and shapes of an abstract painting will have emotional correlates— consider the titles Kandinsky chose for some of his works, or the darkening palette of Rothko’s canvases before the time that he took his own life—but we might also carry out a Clement Greenberg-style analysis and interpret certain minimalist paintings as being about color, flatness, in short, about the resources of their art. This approach can carry over to anti-aesthetic art as well. (The term comes from Timothy Binkley’s “Piece: Contra Aesthetics.”) Duchamp’s Urinal, Rauschenberg’s Erased De Kooning Drawing, Cage’s 4’33”, Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece are all making claims about the production of art in their time. And we might acknowledge aesthetic qualities in explaining how they do so. Thus Urinal might seem stolid and unapologetic, Erased De Kooning confrontational, 4’33” cerebral, Cut Piece insidiously subversive. That is, each of these works makes cognitive as well as perceptual appeals, and their overall functioning can be most fully characterized by ascribing aesthetic qualities as well as summarizing their didactic content Let me finish with a concrete example, one that anticipates the course of the following chapters by underscoring the need for critical guidance for understanding difficult and demanding works of art. The example is a piece in my home-town art museum, Anselm Kiefer’s painting Burning Rods. Executed over a four-year span from 1984 to 1987, the work confronts viewers with a massive, heavily encumbered canvas. The painting is 18.25 feet long and 10.85 feet tall, with the paint overlaid with lead, copper wire, and straw. The predominant tones are black, gray, and golden brown, the overall effect aggressive and off-putting. The identifying signage describes the piece as a “vast charred landscape,” and it is indeed tempting to read it as a blighted landscape vista. Curving parallel lines or scratches in the

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upper quadrant that appear to be receding toward a golden-hued horizon invite viewers to imagine a tilled field. And we may indeed be hard-wired to view abstract forms, whenever possible, as landscapes we can imaginatively enter. But as already noted, this is not an inviting landscape. The adjectives “charred” and “blighted” have already been proposed; no humans are present. So the scene seems at best dystopian, post-apocalyptic. Wherein lies the value of this painting? There is one other noteworthy feature that gives the work its title— a bundle of fourteen vertical silver-gray forms clusters in the middle foreground. Further recourse to the explanatory signage provides this esoteric explanation. Viewers are told that the fourteen strokes refer to the ancient Egyptian myth of Isis and Osiris. The king Osiris was murdered by his brother Set. Osiris’s body was torn into fourteen pieces that were scattered throughout Egypt. Osiris’s wife Isis found and reassembled the pieces, then impregnated herself. She gave birth to a son Hortus who killed Set and succeeded his father as king. Thus this very bleak painting has at its core a myth of redemption and regeneration. Moreover, its meaning is broader still, as the vertical array is also said to refer to the fuel rods of the failed Russian nuclear reactor at Chernobyl. (The disaster there occurred in April of 1986—a year before the completion of this painting.) And in fact one of the alternative titles listed for the work is “Fuel Rods.” Thus contemporary references to environmental disaster/nuclear winter can be overlain on the earlier mythology. I doubt any viewers would make these connection without exegetical help. As noted above, the painting contains no figurative elements. And the number fourteen is hardly code for the Isis/Osiris myth in present-day Western culture. Since emotions come valenced—we can sort them into positive (happiness, joy, wonder, awe) and negative (anger, hatred, jealousy, envy) categories—viewers could easily ascribe an appropriate feeling tone to Burning Rods. But they would surely require prompting to access the additional esoteric references, which I assume flow from artist statements and the like. The signage at the St. Louis Art Museum ends with this overall summary: “The monumental size and imposing physical bulk of this work are matched by Kiefer’s ambition to address the profound issues of death, destruction, and renewal that continually confront humanity.” Some viewers might be drawn in simply by the scale and formal values of this work. But others—puzzle fanciers who like arcana in art, appreciators drawn to the apocalyptic themes of this work—would only have their

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enthusiasm kindled when informed of the wider context and more farreaching references. For such help, critical guidance seems essential. In the following chapters, I will construct and defend a theory explaining the ways in which critics can provide these forms of aid.

3 · Hume on the Standard of Taste

This chapter is devoted to a presentation and critique of Hume’s classic 1757 essay “Of the Standard of Taste.” My goal is to develop a neo-Humean account of aesthetic appreciation. After touching on the warring intuitions with which Hume begins—the first positing rampant subjectivity, the second shared standards—I turn to his discussion of the proper conditions for aesthetic judgment. His charming mechanistic account of external hindrances and internal disorders, both of which can disturb the capacity for correct judgment, eventuates in a summary passage setting out conditions for appreciation that still ring true today. Hume’s checklist includes finding a proper time and place, bringing the fancy to a suitable disposition, achieving serenity of mind, and giving due attention to the object. I next present Hume’s portrait of ideal critics with its specification of their five essential traits—delicacy of imagination, practice, comparison, good sense, and freedom from prejudice. I believe Hume’s approach provides an invaluable foundation for defending any notion of objective aesthetic judgment as well as for describing the workings of critical advice. I argue that two additional traits, emotional responsiveness and imaginative fluency, must be added to his account to suit it to the twentieth- and twenty-first-century artworlds. In closing, I introduce two remaining problems that need to be addressed: the role of the test of time, and the notion of blameless differences. Setting out and resolving these problems take up the next two chapters.

hume’s e ssAy: s ome bACkground Hume’s justly famous essay “Of the Standard of Taste” was first published in 1757 in a collection titled Essays Moral, Political, and Literary.1

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Hume was an established intellectual figure in Enlightenment Britain at the time. His first major work, A Treatise of Human Nature, had appeared in 1739/40. It is the volume he described retrospectively as having fallen stillborn from the press. He persevered with a pair of offerings a decade or so later—the Enquiry concerning Human Understanding (1748) and its companion Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals (1751)—meant to cover much the same ground as the Treatise but in a more accessible fashion. Since none of these three works offers an extended treatment of aesthetic issues, contemporary aestheticians often concentrate on two essays from the 1757 collection, “Of the Standard of Taste” and the equally renowned “On Tragedy.”2 This can bring it about that Hume’s aesthetic writings seem scattershot and few in number measured against the breadth of his career. Yet Hume remains an essential contributor to eighteenth- century British aesthetics. Much of the theory he puts in place to explain moral value, motivation, and choice carries over to the aesthetic realm. And many commentators present Hume’s aesthetic claims as a seamless part of his larger philosophy, continuous with his account of our recognition of and response to moral value. For example, Theodore Gracyk writes in his Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Hume’s aesthetics that “much of [Hume’s] technical discussion of aesthetics appears only as an illustration of his moral theory. . . . Thus the two essays that appear to summarize Hume’s aesthetics are best understood as applications of a larger philosophical account of human nature, including our social nature.” And Timothy Costelloe, in his survey of recent work on Hume’s aesthetics, states that “Hume’s view of aesthetics is colored by and extends his approach to morals.”3 Despite these cautions, I find Hume’s essay “Of the Standard of Taste”— henceforth “Hume’s Essay” or simply “the Essay”—highly suggestive as a self-standing document. Rather than trying to present myself as a historian of philosophy in the pages that follow, someone eager to get absolutely clear about what Hume really meant in this much discussed and complex piece, I will approach this particular work as a reader intent on a rational reconstruction. My goal is to make Hume my own. Moreover, I believe that my (re)construal of Hume yields a compelling account of the critical enterprise, one that can explain current practice and shed light on a number of longstanding philosophical puzzles. This doesn’t mean that I approach Hume’s Essay as entirely uncontextualized. His fellow empiricist philosophers had already sown the ground for a discussion of aesthetic taste. Scholars trace Hume’s inspiration to

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the aesthetic treatises of Du Bos, Addison, Hutcheson, and Locke. So there was considerable precedent for a system that was sentiment based, with beauty and deformity configured much like secondary qualities, discerned by something resembling an internal sense. (See Dubos, Locke, and Hutcheson, respectively.). Among the carryovers from Hume’s moral philosophy, perhaps the most important to acknowledge and understand is the sentiment-based aspect of Hume’s theory. His accounts of both moral and aesthetic response are grounded in the triggering of two key sentiments—approbation and disapprobation. These labels might seem unwieldy to us today, encouraging some to make too quick assimilation to emotive theories from the early twentieth century. In addition to overcoming the oddity of Hume’s two starring sentiments, present- day readers must decide whether, in the aesthetic case, Hume assumes that beauty just is a specific sentiment aroused in appreciators’ breasts. He famously proclaims in the Essay that “beauty is no quality in things themselves; it exists merely in the mind which contemplates them, and each mind perceives a different beauty” (230). Many Hume scholars try to save him from the radical subjectivity that this statement seems to invite. Thus Gracyk argues at length that Hume isn’t attempting to equate or identify beauty with the sentiment aroused, but is instead promulgating a dispositional theory. On this reading beauty is a genuine property in things that happens to arouse a specific response in us. Several subsequent passages encourage this interpretation. For example, Hume states that “some particular forms or qualities, from the original structure of the internal fabric, are calculated to please, and others to displease; and if they fail, it is from some apparent defect or imperfection of the internal organ” (233). Surely Hume intends “the internal fabric” to indicate aspects of the perceiver’s mind, as the sentence seems most plausible when its opening clause and its closing mention of “the internal organ” are co-referential. Two paragraphs later, he pronounces, “Though it be certain that beauty and deformity, [no] more than sweet or bitter, are not qualities in objects, but belong entirely to the sentiment, internal or external, it must be allowed that there are certain qualities in objects which are fitted by nature to produce those particular feelings” (235). While these passages are consistent with Hume’s opening presentation of beauty as subjective, they mitigate this outcome by positing a pre- established harmony or fit between certain properties of objects and the attendant responses of perceivers. Such regularities might, if sufficiently frequent and robust, undergird a standard of the sort Hume seeks.

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It should be noted that the passages I’ve quoted to raise the issue of objectivity come from markedly different moments of the Essay. Hume starts off paradoxically, seemingly endorsing a common-sense tenet about differences in taste that he eventually discards. His own position emerges only after a meandering discussion of the commonly received view. The leisurely pace and structure of Hume’s introduction no doubt indicate the time and patience available to consumers of eighteenth- century essays. Readers must slog through several pages comparing and contrasting aesthetic disputes with first speculative (scientific) disagreements and then moral disagreements before Hume finally tips his hand in the eighth paragraph. He announces this turnaround by presenting a pair of cases— Milton versus Ogilby, Addison versus Bunyan—meant to display an irrefutable difference in literary quality and thus to motivate the existence of an objective standard of taste. Ironically, the fortunes of at least three of these authors have fallen considerably since Hume wrote. So his comparisons no longer strike his audience as exemplifying a clear “species of common sense.” At this point it might be best to postpone plunging into vexed interpretive debates about Hume’s overall intent and instead situate his positive proposal in the context of the rhetorical give and take that opens the Essay. In the following section I will observe how he sets the scene at the start of this piece and lays the ground for the view that emerges.

hume seT s up his prop o sAL Hume’s relaxed exposition acquaints his audience with a pair of warring intuitions—the first positing rampant subjectivity, the second shared standards—between which he hopes to adjudicate. Hume opens the Essay by noting how frequently we disagree about matters of taste. As he puts it, “The great variety of taste, as well as of opinion, which prevails in the world is too obvious not to have fallen under everyone’s observation” (226). Thus he flatters his readers at the very start, assuming that they are observant enough to have registered this salient aspect of human interaction. Hume soon complicates his apparent endorsement of this opening truism by suggesting differences that come with different subject matters. He proposes that in evaluative disagreements, those where praise and blame are dispensed, discussants agree about generalities but differ regarding their instantiations. He points out that the general praise for elegance, propriety, simplicity, and spirit and the similarly shared condemnation

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of fustian, affectation, coldness and false brilliancy falter when specific examples of each are proposed. Note that this initial discussion features terms that describe the presence (and absence) not of morally exemplary behavior but of aesthetically worthy writing.4 This helps signal that Hume’s overriding interest in this essay is aesthetic disputation. In the following paragraph, Hume extends his analysis to religious and moral quarrels—that is, to disagreements about virtue and vice. He states that “writers of all nations and all ages concur in applauding justice, humanity, magnanimity, prudence, veracity, and in blaming the opposite qualities” but differ when presented with “particular pictures of manners” (228). That is, we disagree about what count as specific instances of justice, humanity, and so on. Hume uses the example of the Koran to illustrate this claim, stating that the prophet there “bestows praise on such instances of treachery, inhumanity, cruelty, revenge, bigotry, as are utterly incompatible with civilized society” (229).5 After sketching the topography of evaluative disagreement, Hume proposes that the situation is reversed in the speculative realm. He suggests that participants in scientific and philosophical disputes disagree at the level of generalities but find common ground with regard to specifics. He does not offer detailed examples to support this claim. Perhaps he has in mind what we today call the under- determination of theory. This obtains whenever we agree on an assortment of empirical observations that can be used to support competing, even incompatible, explanatory theories. For example, planetary movements discernible to the naked eye comport equally well with both geocentric and heliocentric theories. And in the realm of speculative philosophy, the apparent properties and persistence of the physical objects that seem to surround us is equally well explained on both realist and idealist hypotheses. Hume does not pause long on this side of the divide, concentrating instead on cases of evaluative dispute. In the very short sixth paragraph of his piece, Hume voices our shared impatience with the degree of disagreement he has just documented, declaring, “It is natural for us to seek a standard of taste, a rule by which the various sentiments of men might be reconciled” (229). I certainly concur. I believe that Hume here points to a common human trait, the fact that most of us both value and seek out like-mindedness. However, the backand-forth continues. In the next paragraph, Hume introduces a contrast between judgment and sentiment and announces the idealist view, quoted above, that beauty exists not in things themselves but only in the minds that contemplate them. I will return to this claim shortly. Hume’s intro-

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duction reaches a climax of sorts when he enunciates the maxim that has motivated his entire exposition: “The proverb has justly determined it to be fruitless to dispute concerning tastes” (230). He is of course referring to the Latin tag De gustibus non est disputandum that we first encountered in canvassing debates about gustatory taste in chapter 1 above. After delivering this seemingly authoritative support for the received view, Hume finally reveals some countervailing considerations to support his own alternative account. I have in mind his introduction of the pair of literary contrasts, Ogilby versus Milton, Bunyan versus Addison, meant to exemplify a difference in literary quality so clear that it is acknowledged not just by experts but by anyone possessed of common sense. Hume provides vivid analogies to illustrate the enormous gulf supposedly involved in each of these pairings. The gap in literary quality is said to be mirrored by that between a molehill versus Tenerrife or a pond versus an ocean. Readers unfamiliar with geography must consult references to learn that Teneriffe is one of the Canary Islands whose active volcanic peak is the highest point of all Atlantic islands.6 Once Hume has staked out the claim that some assessments of artistic quality or worth ought to compel universal consent, he needs to defend himself against the inevitable retort that there is disagreement even about such allegedly clear cases. The passages that follow in Hume’s Essay are intended to address this challenge. They shore up Hume’s claim by identifying proper circumstances for aesthetic judgment and indicating what can go wrong when these do not obtain. This aspect of Hume’s exposition is actually foreshadowed to some extent by his earlier remarks on the subjectivity of beauty. In that discussion Hume initially seems to side with subjectivists. He states that sweet and bitter are no more properties of objects than beauty and deformity. Since these first two tastes would be clear cases of Lockean secondary qualities, the implication is that beauty and deformity share the same status. But Hume qualifies this position when he suggests that certain background conditions can come into play and affect the degree of agreement or disagreement regarding such qualities as sweet and bitter. For instance, he notes in passing in paragraph seven that “according to the disposition of the organs, the same object may be both sweet and bitter” (230). Somewhat later in the Essay, Hume cites further examples of such variability, mentioning that tastes are altered when perceivers are fevered, colors when they have jaundice.7 Importantly, both fever and jaundice are signs of illness. They indicate that a perceiver is unwell, but also that he or she is likely to be mistaken about certain sen-

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sory qualities. Examples of this sort invite us to consider whether some sort of normativity governs the attribution of secondary qualities. If we can sort normal perceptual conditions from those that count as aberrant, then the threat of subjectivity might be minimized. This line of thought is developed in much more detail in the tenth paragraph of the Essay.8 I have in mind the passage where Hume uses delightfully mechanistic language to characterize the optimal conditions for viewing and judging works of art. He takes into account not only the disposition of organs but also the overall context of perception and appraisal, warning that “the least exterior hindrance to such small springs, or the least internal disorder, disturbs their motion, and confounds the operation of the whole machine” (232). I assume that Hume employs this mindas-machine trope to show himself to be a modern thinker, at the cutting edge of eighteenth-century scientific theories of the human body. Though he doesn’t immediately pause to cite examples of exterior hindrances or internal disorders, readers can easily fill in these blanks. For instance, reading a poem or viewing a painting is difficult in insufficient light, appreciating music is challenging with competing ambient noise, watching a play is frustrating from seats with poor sight lines, touring an architectural masterpiece is unsatisfying when one has to cope with crowds. Internal impediments to appreciation include any shortcomings of our perceptual systems—blurred vision, ringing ears, clogged nose—as well as more generalized complaints that can compromise all aspects of our experience— nausea, a bad mood, drugs with side effects, a distracting life situation. Cautions of these sorts hold true for both eighteenth- and twenty-firstcentury appreciators, though present-day readers can come up with more technologically based examples and more neurologically informed explanations. This awareness of internal and external impediments prompts Hume to formulate advice for our encounters with works of art. We must all, novices and experts alike, take care that our comportment and state of mind, as well as the circumstances under which we address the works, are optimal for aesthetic appreciation. Otherwise, we are likely to err. Hume goes on to list a number of practical precepts: “choose with care a proper time and place,” “bring the fancy to a suitable situation and disposition,” “[achieve] a perfect serenity of mind, a recollection of thought, a due attention to the object” (232). The conditions Hume sets out here ensure veridical sense perception, focused attention, and the absence of distractions, and importantly, they apply to ideal critics as well as to everyday appreciators.

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hume’s p orTrAiT of The ideAL CriTiC Having set out the conditions for properly judging works of art, Hume turns to the central task of his paper: describing the traits that characterize a true judge or ideal critic. The hope is that the problems surrounding disagreement will vanish if we can arrive at a non-circular way of identifying true judges and, equally important, if their views can be expected to converge. Questions immediately come to mind, as scholars intent on Hume exegesis will ask whether this is in fact Hume’s intention and whether it is fulfilled. I will postpone that discussion until the details of his proposal have been spelled out. But let me emphasize at the start how radical and innovative I find Hume’s approach. In my opening chapter, I suggested a comparison with Kant’s self-ascribed Copernican Revolution. In seeking a way to identify worthy works of art, Hume redirects our attention away from the properties of candidate works and instead invites us to contemplate the capacities that allow critics to correctly assess them. Briefly, Hume describes five traits that are singly necessary and jointly sufficient to identify ideal critics. Those traits are: delicacy of taste, practice, comparison, freedom from prejudice, and good sense. Whether there are beings possessing this constellation of traits actually among us is yet another relevant question to which I will return below. The first trait Hume takes up, delicacy of taste or delicacy of imagination, is in many ways foundational for those that follow.9 Hume presents this trait as the capacity to make fine discriminations. He says, “It is acknowledged to be the perfection of every sense or faculty to perceive with exactness its most minute objects” (236). Thus someone with delicacy of taste can notice nuances that escape the rest of us. To illustrate such delicacy in action, Hume recounts an episode from Don Quixote in which two of Sancho Panza’s kinsmen argue about the quality of a hogshead of wine. One deems it satisfactory except for an off-taste of leather; the other deems it satisfactory except for an off-taste of iron. Each is partially vindicated when the hogshead is drained revealing an iron key on a leather tab. That is, each disputant has bested the assembled crowd, as each has discerned one of the component flavors sullying the wine. But neither merits a perfect score, as each has overlooked the ingredient discerned by the other. Since both elements were present, a truly accomplished taster would have identified the pair and declared the wine sullied by both a hint of leather and a hint of iron. One might wonder whether delicacy of taste, as construed by Hume,

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is an innate gift or one that can be trained and developed. I suspect the proper answer is: a bit of both. Someone who is color-blind will not be a delicate discerner of the properties of painting, nor will someone who is tone deaf attain delicacy in appreciating music. But these are extreme cases. For most of us, the acuity of our senses is a matter of degree. And we know of many circumstances in which naïve taste, unimpaired by such extreme handicaps, can be educated and advanced. The next pair of critical traits that Hume goes on to discuss, Practice and Comparison, can initially appear to overlap. He introduces the first by noting that nothing seems to increase and improve delicacy of taste more than practice in a particular art. But it soon becomes clear that “practice” here takes on a quite specific meaning. It refers to occasions where appreciators return to a given work to better plumb its depths. As Hume notes, “When objects of any kind are first presented to the eye or imagination, the sentiment, which attends them, is obscure and confused. . . . The taste cannot perceive the several excellencies of the performance; much less distinguish the particular character of each” (237). Hume then proposes a remedy for this predicament—“allow him to acquire experience in those objects, his feeling becomes more exact and nice” (237)—and he goes on to mandate return visits to specific works. “Before we can give judgment on any work of importance, it will even be requisite, that that very individual performance be more than once perused by us, and be surveyed in different lights with attention and deliberation” (237).10 Hume concludes his discussion of practice by indicating some benefits that flow from the remedy he recommends. Familiarity with a given work or performance (performance type) allows appreciators to correctly discern both the relation of parts and the true markers of style. It also inoculates against those florid and superficial species of beauty that are initially seductive but don’t merit genuine allegiance. I believe present- day readers will concur with Hume’s advice. Many can acknowledge how hard it is to take in a work on first encounter, especially with the performing arts whose relationship to time unfolds on their terms, not ours. It is hard to grasp the words of a song on first hearing, let alone calculate their full meaning and significance. Listeners trying to discern the structure of an instrumental work on first hearing must engage in a formidable set of calculations, not only processing the present set of sounds but also determining how they relate to what came before as well as how they set our expectations for what follows. Similar considerations apply to the narrative arts. Movie afficianados often view favorite films multiple times in order to catch subtleties they

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may have initially missed. Appreciators return in similar fashion to favorite poems, favorite songs, favorite plays. All these examples count as instances of Humean practice. Hume believes that understanding and appreciation of works of art is also deepened by the third trait on his list, Comparison. Comparison complements practice. It sends appreciators not back to the same work but to other related works that can serve in one way or another to illuminate the work in question. So comparison invites them to consider other works by the same artist, similar works by other artists. Both these detours can help audience members chart artistic development and artistic influence. Hume suggests that all works are likely to please in some respect, but “comparison alone [allows us to] fix the epithets of praise and blame. . . . One accustomed to see, and examine, and weigh the several performances, admired in different ages and nations, can alone rate the merits of a work exhibited to his view, and assign its proper rank” (238). Hume is concerned above all here with summary judgments indicating beauty’s presence or absence. By contrast, my concern, here and elsewhere, is with the entire range of judgments one might make of a given work. This includes acknowledging its non-aesthetic (perceptual) and aesthetic qualities, noting its representational and expressive powers, and capturing its discursive content, all in addition to formulating an overall evaluation. Comparisons of the sort Hume recommends can enhance our ability to make these various judgments. While the passages I have quoted suggest that Hume emphasized comparisons across artworlds—note his reference to performances admired in different ages and nations—I think intra-artworld comparisons are equally crucial. Consider how much art-historical teaching consists in contextualizing works by familiarizing students with not only an artist’s overall oeuvre but also the genres, schools, and movements within which she practiced. This is Humean comparison in action. The two remaining traits that Hume discusses are Freedom from Prejudice and Good Sense. The first demands that appreciation be unbiased. Rivalry and personal animosity should not hinder aesthetic judgment, nor should undue affection or admiration. Pernicious stereotypes should also be rejected. Hume uses the analogy of oratory to illustrate the workings of prejudice, reminding us that successful orators are aware of their audience and “have a regard to their particular genius, interests, opinions, passions, and prejudices” (239). At first glance this might seem to champion just the sorts of distorting lenses Hume hopes to eradicate. But his further comments suggest he is simply advocating another sort of contextualization,

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urging critics to put themselves in the position of the intended audience when judging works from other times and places. Hume condemns the critic who fails to make this adjustment: “If the work be addressed to persons of a different age or nation, he makes no allowance for their peculiar views and prejudices; but, full of the manners of his own age and country, rashly condemns what seemed admirable in the eyes of those for whom alone the discourse was calculated. If the work be executed for the public, he never sufficiently enlarges his comprehension. . . . By this means, his sentiments are perverted” (239).11 At the close of his Essay, Hume returns once more to the topic of prejudice and allows that while religious differences ought not to count as blemishes in works of art, extreme moral differences cannot be tolerated.12 Hume declares that “reason, if not an essential part of taste, is at least requisite to the operations of this latter faculty” (240), and his final critical trait, Good Sense, is best glossed as the effective use of reason in assessing works of art. There are two main circumstances in which Humean good sense comes into play. First, it enables us to discern part/whole relationships in works of art, —that is, to recognize and evaluate form. Thus Hume notes an appreciator’s mind must be “capacious enough to comprehend all those parts, and compare them with each other” (240). Second, good sense enables us to determine an artist’s aims and calculate the degree to which they were achieved, —that is, to make sophisticated means/ends calculations. Here Hume observes that a work’s ends must be “carr[ied] constantly in our view, when we peruse any performance; and we must be able to judge how far the means employed are adapted to their respective purposes” (240). In closing his discussion, Hume indicates one last manner in which good sense should be recruited. It is a self-reflexive application. The characters in tragedy and epic poetry “must be represented as reasoning, and thinking, and concluding, and acting suitably to their characters and circumstances” (230), and appreciators must use their powers of reasoning to evaluate the artist’s representation of the characters’ reason. Once he has finished his description of the five essential traits of a good critic, Hume comments on their collective scarcity. Since the generality of men lack these perfections, “a true judge of the finer arts is observed, even during the most polished ages, to be . . . rare” (241). Nevertheless, he sums up the situation that obtains when all five traits are present: “Strong sense, united to delicate sentiment, improved by practice, perfected by comparison, and cleared of all prejudice, can alone entitle critics to this valuable character” (241). Even more important, he goes on to specify the relation

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in which this configuration stands to the elusive standard of taste: “and the joint verdict of such, wherever they are to be found, is the true standard of taste and beauty.” I take this passage to mean that Hume fully expects the verdicts of true judges or ideal critics to converge; that seems the force of his phrase “joint verdict.” The set of shared judgments will then constitute the sought after standard of taste, with the works praised by this assembly of critics constituting the set of worthy works.

suppLemen Ting hume’s prop o sAL Of course, the question of the moment is whether Hume’s expectation will in fact be met. The possibility of critical disagreement raises the crucial issue of realism in aesthetics. Are there objective claims around which critical judgments will coalesce? I will be discussing this extensively in what follows. Chapter 5 is titled “When Critics Disagree”; chapter 4 sets the stage for the discussion in a number of ways. For now, however, I want to reflect on the portrait Hume has offered of the ideal critic. Does the constellation of traits we have just examined guarantee an authoritative and discerning appreciator of art? I believe two additional traits—imaginative fluency and emotional responsiveness—must be added to Hume’s list. This is because many compelling accounts of art have it activating these two faculties. And so critics must be capable of such stimulation. Kendall Walton’s theory of art, set out in his book Mimesis as MakeBelieve (1990), is one that foregrounds imagination. Walton believes that works of art are props in games of make-believe. Thus they mandate trains of thought, feeling, and imagination in appreciators who interact with them. Walton uses children’s games as an illustrative example. Children pretending that stumps are bears, or that globs of mud are pies, are similarly engaging in a collective imaginative practice, often following a set of implicit rules that are not, and need not be, fully specified when the game is initiated. Transferred to the realm of art, this approach has it that in, say, looking at a representational painting, we are imagining that we in fact see the scene depicted; in watching a movie or a play, we are imagining that we witness the characters’ interactions. In reading a novel, our imaginative reconstruction is more complex, as we don’t have direct perceptual cues but must instead understand the meanings of the words before us and then fill out in our imagination the scenes, characters, and incidents that they describe. Gregory Currie is another philosopher who promotes an imagination-based theory of our interactions with art.

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In her work on landscape appreciation, Emily Brady proposes a broader taxonomy of our imaginative powers. She distinguishes four different modes of imagining— exploratory, projective, ampliative, and revelatory— and provides illustrations of each.13 The modes Brady describes are meant to supplement the more basic associative and metaphorical ways we employ our imaginative faculty. While exploratory imagination tracks perceptual experience and makes us more aware of aesthetic qualities, projective imagination places overlays onto that experience. Ampliative imagination recruits imagination’s inventive powers, often “contextualizing the aesthetic object with narrative images” (156). The final mode, revelatory imagination, discloses new ideas and meanings. These arrive not through intellectual endeavor but as a “gift,” a by-product of heightened aesthetic experience (157). The proposal that Brady puts forward for landscape appreciation clearly carries over to our interactions with works of art. Interestingly, Brady attaches a normative dimension to her theory, taxing appreciators with the obligation to “imagine well.” This could be fleshed out in various ways with the arts. To the extent that imagination takes us beyond what is given in perception, we might recognize various criteria of correctness, asking that our imaginative flights accord with the artist’s intentions, with the ‘directions’ encoded in the work, with the presuppositions of the artworld and general culture of the time, and so on. As always, these criteria will sometimes coincide, but will raise philosophical puzzles in circumstances where they come apart. Turn next to emotion. Philosophers have long attended to this category. Recall that Plato took care to condemn the irrational (and obstructionist) tendencies of the spirited and appetitive parts of the soul. Both Descartes and Spinoza wrote extensively on this faculty, offering taxonomies and singling out certain emotions as basic. Hume himself addressed emotion at length in book 2 of his Treatise, titled “Of the Passions.” The attempt to privilege a subset of emotions continues to the present day, with Paul Ekman’s insistence on a set of universal basic emotions. His original list comprised happiness, sadness, fear, anger, disgust, and surprise, but was expanded later in his career. In the mid-twentieth century analytic philosophers made a significant advance by distinguishing emotion from mere feeling and arguing for a cognitive component that allowed emotions to be object- directed and assessed for appropriateness. Errol Bedford and Anthony Kenny are two authors who initiated this phase of theorizing; Robert Solomon’s claim that emotions are best construed as hasty judgments took the cognitive approach to an extreme.14 Today’s accounts add

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neuropsychological insights to those earlier theories, while a pendulum swing toward more bodily-based accounts has thinkers like Jenefer Robinson and Jesse Prinz endorsing theories that are in a way revivals of the James-Lange view (named after nineteenth-century psychologist William James and his contemporary Carl Lange).15 These latter theories take emotional responses to originate with awareness of bodily disturbances. Since at least some of those disturbances are triggered by goings-on in the world, this allows us to accord emotions alerting and appraising roles. And while emotions can be irrational when based on false beliefs (cp. the entire category of phobias) or on misconstruals of complex situations, theorists like Noël Carroll believe that at least minimal appropriateness standards are in place.16 Thus an episode of anger can be critiqued if it is directed at the wrong person, if it is tied to an incorrect narrative, or if these two elements are correctly placed but the force or extent of feeling fails to match the situation to which it is a response. When these relationships are proper, the anger can be endorsed, and we assume such emotional episodes inform us about the world. In the end, however emotions are construed, critics must be able to recognize and assess the role emotion plays in art. Aestheticians have proposed a variety of theories about this link. Some see artworks as expressing their creators’ previously unacknowledged feelings (Croce, Collingwood), others see them as expressing the feelings of an implied artist or a more detached persona (Robinson), some see them as vectors enabling the transmission of emotion to audience members (Tolstoy), while still others concentrate on the feelings expressed without any concern for who may have felt them either prior to or after the work’s creation (Langer). To appreciate any of these possible functions of art—and all are in their own ways highly plausible— critics must be familiar with and somewhat open to emotion. A critic so zipped up and repressed that she never allows herself to feel would not be able to sympathetically engage with emotionally charged works. And while sensible theories nowadays don’t require that artists, let alone critics, have lived through each and every emotional nuance— or storm— contained in a particular work, it would seem that critics must have accumulated some actual emotional experience and must be conversant with the commonsense received view of emotion prevalent in their own society as well as the views prevalent in more distant times and cultures whose works they critique. The current topic, art’s intersection with imagination and emotion, prompts questions about creativity. Must all art be to some degree auto-

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biographical? How can artists create situations and feelings with which they have neither direct nor indirect acquaintance? While these questions address the circumstances of the artist, this follow-up comes to mind: is appreciation subject to similar constraints? That is, are we all limited to understanding, just as artists are limited to creating, works that match our lived experience? Science fiction might be one counterexample that silences this worry; so too perhaps the frequency with which writers of fiction create and speak through narrators of the opposing gender. Clearly writers who generate fiction about impossible, nonexistent, or just casually counterfactual worlds cannot be drawing solely on their own actual experience.17 We might rebut the science fiction challenge by citing likely generative techniques—for example, canceling or reversing a few key facts about the real world in order to yield alternative universes. Another possibility is one suggested by Descartes’ Meditation I comparison of the creativity of dreamers and painters. He maintained that each creates by reassembling preexisting parts. Such compositionality allows a man, a woman, a horse, a fish, and a goat to yield the centaur, mermaid, and satyr of ancient myth. I’m not sure whether these mechanisms for coming up with plausible non-realist story lines explain the possibilities of inhabiting a different gender or describing emotions one has never felt. Perhaps both the creation and the reception of such possibilities can be explained via a perspectival theory, an account of each individual’s presumably unique point of view on the world as well as an explanation of how and to what extent one person can share or come to understand the perspective of another. For now I propose the following takeaway: so long as our ability to understand and respond to our actual conspecifics is no less puzzling than our ability to take in their fictional counterparts, then the absence of a full-fledged explanation needn’t halt the spinning out of the aesthetic theory here in progress.

C on Temp orAry CriTiQue My overarching interest in this book is the nature of aesthetic appreciation, how we decide what works merit it, what practices promote it. Since criticism and appreciation are correlative concepts, each informing the other, I have chosen Hume’s Essay as my entering wedge for exploring these issues. Before moving on to the central interpretive problems that the Essay raises, I will take a little time to explore some responses contemporary phi-

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losophers have offered to Hume’s view. My sample is drawn from papers by analytic philosophers published over the last fifty- or-so years. I will sort these into three categories, first taking up some logical criticisms aimed at Hume— charges of circularity and inconsistency in his formulation, next turning to the paradox or antinomy of taste that commentators claim he must overcome, and finally considering some innovative complaints aimed at the very idea of advice-giving in this realm. I will table a full consideration of some of these until a later chapter. Peter Kivy, in his 1967 paper “Hume’s Standard of Taste: Breaking the Circle,” maintains that Hume’s characterization of at least some of the traits he ascribes to ideal critics is viciously circular.18 Kivy believes that Hume’s specification of both practice and comparison require reference to, and so identification of, good (beautiful) works of art. But since the overall point of Hume’s theory is to allow identification of just this class, he isn’t entitled to presuppose it at the outset. Here is Kivy’s statement of this charge: “Thus (1) the beautiful (or excellent) is defined in terms of the good critic; (2) the good critic is defined in terms of practice and use of comparisons; and (3) practice and use of comparisons are defined in terms of the beautiful (or excellent). Obviously in these two cases the definition of beauty is circular.” 19 Kivy believes the circle is broken with regard to the remaining three critical capacities, delicacy, freedom from prejudice, and good sense, because these are not limited to the approval of good art. Happily, I don’t think Kivy’s charges stick even in the case of practice and comparison. Jettisoning Hume’s emphasis on beauty makes a start at exonerating his theory. I have claimed repeatedly that not all good art is beautiful, nor does all worthy art generate pleasant feelings in its audience.20 It might then seem that the circle is simply redrawn with the category of good or worthy art being presupposed. In fact, Kivy’s initial formulation of his objection uses these notions: “(1) good works of art are works of art approved by good critics; (2) good critics are critics possessing five requisite qualities; and (3) critics possessing the five requisite qualities are critics who approve good works of art” (60). But recall my discussion of Humean practice and comparison. While these might be employed by critics in the course of identifying good art, that particular value-laden category is not needed to characterize them. All we need is the notion “same work” (to describe practice) and the notions “work by the same artist,” “work in the same genre,” “work from the same school,” “work with similar subject,” “work with similar form,” and so on (to describe comparison). Should naysayers relocate the circularity to the concept “art,” we

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can again defuse this charge by retreating to mention of particular arts— painting, poetry, dance, film, architecture, installation, etc., etc. Kivy levels another charge against Hume in his short 2011 paper “Remarks on the Varieties of Prejudice in Hume’s Essay on Taste.”21 Here the logical flaw allegedly resides within one of Hume’s specified traits, freedom from prejudice. While Kivy does not dismiss this category as inherently circular, he claims that two entirely incompatible notions of such freedom can be imagined. The first involves taking an entirely general point of view and so attending to concerns that address the overall human condition; the second eschews such wide focus and instead zooms in on the specific historical and cultural background of a given work.22 The choice between these two interpretations of freedom from prejudice foreshadows a more general dilemma we will examine regarding agreement among critics. Kivy cites passages to show that Hume aligns himself with each of these incompatible positions at different points in the Essay. Thus Hume declares himself a generalist when he remarks “though I should have a friendship or enmity with the author, I must depart from this situation, and, considering myself as a man in general, forget, if possible, my individual being and my peculiar circumstances” (Kivy, 113). Yet he sides with the historicists when he chides the critic who, judging a work “addressed to persons of a different age or nation  .  .  . makes no allowance for their peculiar views and prejudices; but, full of the manners of his own age and country, rashly condemns what seem admirable in the eyes of those for whom alone the discourse was calculated” (Kivy, 112). Has Kivy caught Hume in an inconsistency? There are surely occasions when the two understandings of freedom from prejudice align, for example, when an artist from a disparate artworld cloaks a universal concern or verity in specifics drawn from her own time and culture. But we can just as readily imagine examples where these two strands come apart. In such cases we should perhaps adopt an ordering. The most efficient use of appreciative labor would seem to require first seeing whether the work under consideration speaks to us directly, that is, whether we can somewhat easily discern—and endorse—the content conveyed. This is pursuit of its general appeal.23 If this approach fails, we should next attempt to reconstruct the artist’s intentions in light of what we know about the work’s target audience and the artworld at the time of its creation. We should do our best to contextualize any discordant or troubling aspects of the work. But if these prove morally problematic, we will likely find the work flawed. In such cases a historicist take on a work, one rooted in its time and cul-

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ture of origin, generates what Tamar Gendler calls imaginative resistance. Our refusal to enter into the world of the work can be attributed to a sort of moral fastidiousness. But it signals a failure of the work for reasons that Hume himself would support. In his paper “Hume’s Standard of Taste” (1984), Noël Carroll considers a number of objections to Hume’s project.24 The core of his criticism addresses aspects of Hume’s sentiment-based approach to evaluative judgment. Most notably, Carroll argues that the causal model of aesthetic response that Hume seems to endorse presents appreciation as passive, yet this is incompatible with the intellectual goings on that flag the workings of good sense as well as the ruminations attendant on proper practice and comparison and the considerations that we must knowingly put in place to combat prejudice. Carroll elaborates on the various ways in which Humean critics recruit cognitive capacities, making aesthetic response an active rather than a passive affair. We “identify the category and the purpose of the artwork in order to appropriately respond to it by determining whether its parts facilitate its function . . . we imaginatively postulate alternative structurings of the artwork . . . [we] attempt to identify the function and meaning of the artwork for its original audience. There is a great deal of intellection going on here” (186). Carroll cites the cognitive pleasures that flow from acts of discovery.25 He also points out that were aesthetic response entirely causal, “we would have no reason to return to great artworks in the hope of experiencing them more fully and deeply. For we could only expect to experience the invariant pleasure the work delivers under the proper circumstances” (187). For all these reasons, Carroll proposes a distinction between liking and assessing. While the former is about preferences subject to psychological explanation, the latter requires the marshalling of supporting reasons. Carroll maintains that there is no necessary connection between liking a work of art and judging it to be good (187). The mismatch can work in either direction—we may well enjoy works we know to be wanting, and we may be able to rationally praise works that we don’t in fact enjoy. But clearly Carroll believes that correct critical practice involves not just liking or disliking, but assessing, candidate works. In the end, Carroll finds one last logical flaw in Hume’s account. He proclaims Humean ideal critics redundant. Carroll considers them expendable because, given Hume’s list of required traits, we can each simply cultivate them in ourselves and become our own ideal critics. This dismissal overlooks the possibility that delicacy, in particular, might require

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some innate privileging of each critic’s perceptual abilities. A similar worry applies to the various reasoning processes that for Carroll undergird the remaining traits; not everyone can master the intricacies of logic. And finally, the amount of time required for the accumulation of sufficient practice and comparison surely rules out the possibility that we can each be our own critics across the arts. I conclude that Hume’s account of the traits contributing to critical expertise remains both timely and welcome. And we should reasonably expect to outsource these capacities rather than try to develop them in ourselves. One set of contemporary critics sees Hume’s Essay as an attempt resolve an enduring paradox or antinomy of taste. The paradox arises from the seeming conflict between the subjectivity of preference and the objectivity evinced by any overarching standard. Carroll states the challenge as follows: though taste is subjective, some works are objectively better than others (181). In her paper “Hume and the Foundations of Taste,” Carolyn Korsmeyer offers a similar formulation: taste is subjective, yet some tastes are preferable to others (201).26 Some commentators try to resolve the paradox by looking to Hume’s moral theory to secure the requisite objectivity. Korsmeyer exemplifies this approach in the paper just cited. She offers passages from the Treatise to show that on Hume’s view we share a general human nature; we respond similarly to certain types of beauty that are keyed to utility and are thus related to human flourishing.27 This shared response is facilitated by sympathy, which Hume considered “the great cause of uniformity of character” (207). Korsmeyer indicates the grounds for shared aesthetic judgment when she observes that “as human beings, our similar constitutions dictate that we have similar needs, fears, and desires. The same sorts of things help or hurt us, and in our interaction with others and with the world we share common passions. Therefore, by a natural association of ideas, we take pleasure in the same kinds of aesthetic qualities” (210). In sum, Korsmeyer’s reading proposes a “utilitarian foundation for Hume’s analysis of beauty” (211), one that has us hard-wired to find some aspects of social life pleasing. Presumably this tendency is shared by all suitably thoughtful and undamaged appreciators. While this approach allows Hume to predict uniformity of moral response—such uniformity is critical to his sentiment-based moral theory, and the role of sympathy in achieving near unanimity makes for a plausible just-so story—it carries over to the aesthetic case only if we retain certain posits I have urged us to jettison, namely, an emphasis on beauty and on a causal/ sentimental framing of aesthetic judgment.

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In both his early paper “Rethinking Hume’s Standard of Taste” and in his Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP) article on Hume’s aesthetics, Theodore Gracyk echoes Korsmeyer in emphasizing the continuity between Hume’s Essay and his earlier writings.28 But Gracyk takes a different approach to defusing the paradox of taste, grounding our shared human nature not in the appeal of utility and the requisites of human flourishing but rather in the claim that we’re constituted to respond similarly to certain arrays of qualities in the world. Thus Gracyk ascribes to Hume a dispositional theory of taste, one that treats the perception of beauty on analogy with the perception of color and other secondary qualities.29 Gracyk takes care throughout his discussion to distinguish Hume’s position from that of his predecessor Francis Hutcheson; he notes that Hume does not propose anything so fixed as Hutcheson’s perception of uniformity within diversity as a trigger for our perception of beauty. Gracyk’s interpretation allows that “terms like ‘sweet’ and ‘bitter’ do double duty in ordinary usage, conveying both the private sensations themselves and the dispositional qualities of objects to cause such sensations with ‘sufficient uniformity’ to be predictable” (172). The result is that this model applies to the terms “beautiful” and “virtuous” as well as to “sweet” and “bitter,” “hot” and “cold.” Under normal conditions, our experiences regularly generate appropriate sensations across all these realms—the sensory, the moral, and the aesthetic. More importantly, we expect our conspecifics to be, as Gracyk puts it, “similarly disposed.”30 A dispositional theory has no teeth without this posit of uniformity, though it will always remain vulnerable to skeptical attack. In the 2016 revision of his encyclopedia entry, Gracyk walks back his claim that Hume held a dispositional theory. He suggests there that our knowledge of a dispositional claim like “cork is buoyant” requires awareness of a complex causal claim: “If a piece of cork is placed in water, it floats.” And buoyancy can be attributed to the cork even if the appropriate conditions are never met (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy 3.2). By contrast, our acknowledgement of beauty as Hume presents it is immediate (a sentiment is triggered) and has no such epistemic component. Gracyk also points out that a critic’s recognition of beauty “involves an element of endorsement that does not arise in the observation that [e.g.] ice is cold” (SEP section 3.1). Thus Gracyk’s considered analysis rejects the interpretation that Hume understands beauty on analogy with secondary qualities. However I advocate a widened focus that warrants its reintroduction. I believe a proper analysis of critical practice includes critics’ attribution of

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aesthetic qualities to works as well as their summary judgments of them. And here a dispositional analysis is surely appropriate. Some contemporary commentators address more overarching concerns about Hume’s project. As mentioned in chapter 1, Richard Shusterman complains that Hume’s proposed standard of taste simply enshrines the preferences of his aristocratic peers, the elites in power in his time. Similar critiques have been made more recently of the very notion of a canon in both the visual and the literary arts. Shusterman’s objection is yet another attack on the notion of objectivity, and a careful response must assess the parochialism of the preferences put in place in any proposed standard. In particular, we must assess who gets tapped as an ideal critic and consider whether the possession of, capacity for, or opportunity to develop the requisite traits is a class-bound affair. I will take up this topic in chapter 4. Jerrold Levinson in a pair of papers frames problems concerning not the content but the reception of critical advice. That is, rather than worrying over what some have labelled the antinomy of taste, Levinson asks why, even assuming that critics will agree, novices should follow their advice. What do we gain in exchanging our own preference patterns for those that critics recommend? And what are we to think about the resulting changes in our relations to one another, let alone to the critics we docilely follow? These matters will be the subject of chapter 6.

T wo probLem s To Addre ss g oing forwArd I am confident that a robust variant of Hume’s enterprise, though clearly one we must label a reconstruction, can survive the set of criticisms I have been canvassing. But the reinterpretation I will advocate of Hume’s Essay faces two formidable sticking points—Hume’s notion of blameless differences and his appeal to the so-called test of time. Both come into play when we attempt to single out the ideal critics among us and confirm their qualifications. Hume’s acknowledgement of blameless differences comes after he has set out his account of ideal critics and indicated that their joint verdicts constitute the sought-after standard of taste. Readers will of course wonder whether Hume’s theory and the machinery it employs can accomplish this task. Hume seems to immediately undercut his claim with this concession: “Notwithstanding all our endeavours to fix a standard of taste, and reconcile the discordant apprehensions of men, there still remain two sources of variation . . . [which] will often serve to produce a difference in

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the degrees of our approbation or blame” (243). He traces the first of these sources to differences in character or temperament, the second to differences in the cultural worlds we inhabit: “The one is the different humours of particular men; the other, the particular manners and opinions of our age and country” (243). Importantly, at the close of this paragraph Hume labels such differences “blameless.” The context makes clear that Hume is considering only cases where such differences persist after all other sources of variation he has charted—sensory impairment, lack of delicacy, prejudice, lack of practice, competing comparison classes—have been eliminated. Hume does not seem to think blameless differences threaten the structure he has put in place. He downplays their effect when he says they are “not sufficient indeed to confound all the boundaries of beauty and deformity, but will often serve to produce a difference in the degrees of our approbation or blame” (243). This suggests that blameless differences will cause critics to like or dislike works with varying intensities but will not change the “directionality” of their judgments. That is, such differences will prompt ideal critics to praise or condemn works with different degrees of effusiveness but won’t bring it about that one ideal critic condemns a work that another praises. Skeptical readers may well think Hume is whistling in the wind here, that he is not entitled to shore up his theory in such a facile manner. Some present-day commentators attempt to come to his aid by inserting an appeal to the test-of-time. Hume endorses this notion more than once in the Essay, most ringingly when he proclaims that “The same Homer, who pleased at Athens and Rome two thousand years ago, is still admired at Paris and at London all the changes of climate, government, religion, and language have not been able to obscure his glory” (233). The underlying hope is that we can establish the bona-fides of critics by looking to their appreciation of acknowledged masterpieces, works whose appeal has endured over time and across cultures. But complexities abound here, as masterpieces also (by definition) speak to the general public, and this threatens to return us to the leveling objection entertained in chapter 1. The interplay of blameless differences and the test of time, complicated and vexed, warrants extended treatment en route to a fuller characterization of Humean ideal critics. I will take up these matters next.

4 · Identifying Critics

I begin by taking up this central question about Humean critics: are they real (actual beings to be found among us), or are they ideal (models that we strive to approximate but never in fact match)? I offer an argument, based on the Humean traits of practice and comparison, for the reality of ideal critics. I next consider the nature of such individuals and ask how we can identify the ideal critics among us. Both Hume and his contemporary commentators appeal to the test of time to aid with this task. Hume’s remark “The same Homer who pleased Athens and Rome two thousand years ago is still admired at Paris and at London” identifies a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition for being an ideal critic, as many of us who are not especially discerning admire great works from the past. A quandary arises concerning the appreciation of contemporary art. Experts who appreciate the beauty of Homer might well be stymied by the work of Nicholson Baker, David Foster Wallace, or Italo Calvino. The key question here is how much the future resembles the past. That is, in what ways, if any, do new works that we ought to admire resemble the earlier works that rightly earned our appreciation? I examine a pair of historical theories of art—proposed by Jerrold Levinson and Noël Carroll—that attempt to bridge this gap. I draw morals from both versions, though an additional principle, based on J. S. Mill’s treatment of higher versus lower pleasures, is required to fully activate this solution.

i n T roduC T ion I have completed a preliminary exposition of the view Hume sets out in his essay “Of the Standard of Taste.” In considering that view, it is natu-

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ral to wonder whether the portrait Hume presents of the ideal critic has any real-world instantiations. Answering that question is an integral part of reconstructing Hume’s theory and making Hume our own. At issue is whether there are any ideal critics among us. That is, are Humean critics actual beings to be found, one or two per generation, or are they an ideal or limit toward which candidate critics merely aspire? In what follows I argue that so-called Humean ideal critics are real and attempt to provide an account of their nature. Commentators differ about the question I am taking up—whether Humean critics are real or ideal. Some who take the latter view are James Shelley and Matthew Kieran. In the closing section of his paper “Hume’s Double Standard of Taste,” Shelley declares it “a moral of Hume’s version of the Don Quixote parable that true judges are ideal,” 1 while Kieren, discussing that same parable in his book Revealing Art, states that Hume is “not claiming that there are such people; the notion is a theoretical one which we can only imperfectly realize.”2 Two interpreters who instead view Humean critics as real are Robert Stecker and Paul Guyer. In his text Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art, Stecker notes that to be an ideal observer “one needs an ability to discriminate finely, one needs background knowledge, one needs familiarity with the type of object under appreciation so one is familiar with a comparison class, one needs to be able to see connections and draw inferences, one needs to be free from bias.” He then declares, “An ideal observer is simply a normal observer with these additional skills: a suitably skilled normal observer.”3 In his essay “The Standard of Taste and the ‘Most Ardent Desire of Society,’” Guyer addresses Hume more directly, proposing that it is “clearly part of Hume’s view that our appreciation of much art depends upon specific historical knowledge which could not be discovered by an ideal aesthetic observer but which must really be transmitted to posterity by an actual body of critics.”4

p o sse ssing perfeCTions Shelley bases his interpretation on the claim that the traits of Humean critics are best understood as perfections; as such, they are never possessed in full by actual humans. Discussing an argument of Jeffrey Wieand, Shelley remarks: “Hume is committed to the view that a true judge can never be wrong. But no human being can never be wrong” (439); and later, “Hume generally refers to the five characteristics of true judges as ‘perfections’ . . . as such they are not qualities which all of us possess to some degree or

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other, but like all perfections are qualities which are either possessed in full or not at all” (439). Two instances where Hume does indeed assimilate the judges’ traits to perfections are in his opening discussion of delicacy: “It is acknowledged to be the perfection of every sense or faculty to perceive with exactness its most minute objects and allow nothing to escape its notice and observation . . . a quick and acute perception of beauty and deformity must be the perfection of our mental taste” (236) and his description of the beneficial effects of practice: “The mist dissipates which seemed formerly to hang over the object; the organ acquires greater perfection in its operations and can pronounce without danger of mistake, concerning the merits of every performance” (237). The crux of Shelley’s argument is that humans cannot possess perfections; if perfections could be possessed in part, then they would no longer be complete and perfect. Here is a formalized version of the argument I am attributing to Shelley: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

The defining traits of Humean critics are perfections. Perfections are complete and fully realized. Humans are imperfect beings. No human can possess a fully realized perfection. Therefore no human being can be a Humean critic.

A crucial assumption of this argument is that perfections are fully realized; they do not come in degrees and are not subject to improvement. Paradigm cases would include the infinite attributes traditionally ascribed to God in the Judeo-Christian tradition— omniscience, omnipotence, omnibenevolence—as well as the traits Roderick Firth ascribed to the Ideal Observer in his eponymous ethical theory. Firth’s IO was said to be omniscient with respect to non-ethical facts, omnipercipient, disinterested, and dispassionate, though in all other respects he was declared normal.5 One writer typifies the received view when she notes in a short reflection piece “in Christian tradition it becomes clear that only God can be perfect; only the Divine can ever be complete, whole, no longer be improved.”6 Consider some complications and objections. One might counter that the argument I’ve attributed to Shelley conflates something’s being a perfection with its being whole or complete but then addresses only the latter. For a start, these need not travel together. We might characterize the traits under consideration as capacities rather than countable collections. Thus the perfection of omnibenevolence could be construed not as a collection

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of deeds but rather a disposition—to offer kind and generous behavior in all possible situations. Similarly, omnipotence could be construed not as a set of feats or a measure of strength but as a capability—to succeed or prevail in all physically challenging situations. If these glosses seem apt, then the question whether either state is complete simply doesn’t arise. Moreover, given this construal, the blanket claim that humans cannot possess perfections seems more clearly question-begging. Of course, starting with the familiar examples of divine attributes immediately blocks the possibility of humans exhibiting these traits. But we can approximate that situation by employing Aristotle’s account of virtues acquired through habituation as well as some notion of the practice regimen at the core of strength training and athletic instruction. The former is surely how humans would develop the sympathy and kindheartedness at the core of benevolence. Any sociopaths among us would fail to acquire the relevant dispositions. Similarly physical training focused on practice and habituation would instill the physical capacities that approach or approximate, but of course never attain, omnipotence.

why humeAn CriTiC s mu sT be reAL The nature of perfection is a vexed matter, and I do not want to engage in scholastic debate. Instead, let me turn to two of the five traits Hume ascribed to ideal critics, practice and comparison. I believe this change of focus can resolve the puzzle at hand. Attention to the structure of these two traits shows why we must jettison Shelley’s interpretation. My key claim is that Humean practice and comparison can only be realized by actual persons; thus they cannot be construed as perfections as those are traditionally understood. For a start, neither practice nor comparison is properly conceived of as whole or complete. Both traits can only be understood as arising through the gradual accumulation of experience. Repetition and return are criterial for the notion of practice. One engages in practice by doing something over and over again. Humean practice requires returning repeatedly to a given artwork in search of fuller and deeper understanding. The possibility that practice is an innate trait or capacity—like delicacy of taste, Hume’s first example—is simply incoherent. How might practice have been achieved in advance of experience? Comparison functions similarly. Humean critics make comparisons in order to find both similarities and differences that illuminate important properties of the work under consideration. Just as

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practice requires returning to a work or an artist again and again, comparison requires repeatedly toggling between related works, artists, oeuvres, or schools. It, too, can only be achieved by banking experiences. The crucial point is this: only an actual being can gradually accumulate a set of (in this case, aesthetic) experiences. Thus, considering the nature of practice and comparison sustains the conclusion that Humean critics are real, not ideal, beings.

THE NAT URE OF THE CRITIC S’ SPECIAL TRAIT S In what follows I use the phrase “ideal critics” in a new sense to label those actual individuals in any given society who possess the five traits Hume singles out.7 I have argued that some traits of Humean ideal critics take the form of capacities that are developed or realized. This rules out classifying them as traditional perfections. I now maintain that all the traits Hume discusses count as such. Humean delicacy can certainly be understood on this model. It does require an initial degree of perceptual acuity which many of us will never achieve. Both the color blind and the near-sighted fall short in visual acuity, the tone deaf and the hearing impaired in aural acuity. Yet even those on the other end of the spectrum—individuals with rarified sensory apparatus, ideal critics in the making among them—must exercise their sensory systems to become acquainted with the wide range of qualities that can figure in critical judgments. And in fact most of us can and do school the relevant capacities. Consider how an art history student learns to see, an oenophile to taste, a music theory student to hear, more acutely, especially after being trained in the relevant special vocabulary— for example, “plasticity” and “chiaroscuro” for the visual arts, “nose” and “underside” for talk of wine, “augmented” and “syncopated” with regard to music. In sum, those with true Humean delicacy of taste would have to be born with sufficiently sensitive sense organs but would also have to cultivate their abilities, interrogating many works of art as well as many everyday objects and situations, in order to realize their special gifts. Delicacy of taste is foundational for the other traits Hume champions.8 Moreover, each of those traits aligns with the model under consideration. I believe this line of thought confirms that critical expertise is not best understood as a perfection. Humean ideal critics stand apart from the pack, but as actual humans, they are neither omniscient nor infallible. Their delicacy is developed. Their practice and comparison credentials are earned rather than accorded all at once by divine fiat. Similar remarks apply to the

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remaining two categories, good sense and freedom from prejudice. Both are honed by practice and acknowledged after a track record has been established. If we grant that the so- called perfections we have been discussing can be attained by ordinary humans, how would we know when this has been achieved? One possible answer appeals to thresholds: each Humean trait is in place when a certain limit has been passed. Might it be that delicacy of taste, and perhaps all the other critical virtues Hume sets out, can be understood in this manner? For instance, for each sensory modality, is there a certain degree of acuity beyond which we’d grant the possessor delicacy? This doesn’t seem plausible. First, the evolution of each critic’s taste is distinct and would depend heavily on contextual factors. Even with regard to a single art, experiences that grounded appreciation within one artworld or culture, or for works of a specific school or genre, might not be finegrained enough to successfully ground appreciation in another time or place, or for works of a different school or genre. In addition, human performance is always changing (cp. such barriers as the four-minute mile), and technological improvements allow us increasingly precise measurements. Thus it may be that the degree of acuity that grounds delicacy in one period is nothing special in a succeeding era. Then again, environmental and evolutionary factors might actually diminish our perceptual capacities over time. Consider the effect of noise pollution on hearing. And finally, consider those instances in which an individual possesses too fine a talent for discrimination. Supertasters were discussed in chapter 1. Their ability to discern certain flavors makes them unable to appreciate broccoli, coffee, red wine, and more. Thus they miss out on many gustatory pleasures. Similarly, those with perfect pitch often find their experiences of everyday life worsened rather than enhanced, since they are immediately aware of the notes sounded by all the clanging and banging around them. The reasons just cited suggest that we cannot appeal to thresholds to demarcate Humean delicacy of taste. The discussion of practice and comparison suggested that ascription of these traits is highly contextual as well and so equally unsuited to understanding in terms of thresholds. Is there ever a point at which an ideal critic has accumulated enough practice or comparison? The possibility always remains open that yet another return to a work will trigger fresh insights or highlight a neglected detail. The fact that some theorists insist even simple metaphors resist complete and final paraphrase suggests that complex works will always offer further interpretive rewards. Comparison is similarly rich and fecund. As the philosopher

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Nelson Goodman noted, any two items will have some property in common.9 Some juxtapositions will be critically fruitful, others not, and each can be expected to speak to some but not all critics. But here too, the possibility always remains that a newly proposed comparison will illuminate hitherto overlooked aspects of a work. Let me note in passing that more systematic attempts to alter or enlarge the comparison class against which a work is judged can substantially shift our sense of its constituent properties. Recall Kendall Walton’s aforementioned article “Categories of Art” which argues that the aesthetic properties of a work vary with the category to which it is assigned and then goes on to ask whether there is, for each work, some one correct category. Consider, too, T. S. Eliot’s claim—an outlier for sure—that work meanings change with the passage of time because the continually growing set of successors alters the works that preceded them.10 Walton’s and Eliot’s views remind us of the open-endedness of practice and comparison; both traits resist tidy demarcation. Similar conclusions would follow were we to seek a measure of rational fluency that suffices for good sense, or of open-mindedness that confers freedom from prejudice. In neither of these cases does there seem to be a clear threshold beyond which we would unequivocally grant someone the special status of ideal critic.

A C onseQuenCe of my view Note one key consequence of my proposal as it now stands. Given the interpretation I have urged for Hume’s notions of practice and comparison, it follows that ideal critics themselves evolve and mature. If practice and comparison are processes that result from repeated returns to single or to highly similar works (practice) and from repeated oscillations between different works (comparison), and if good sense must be trained, freedom from prejudice established through repeated trials, then the ideal critic must gradually acquire his or her status by having the requisite experiences. As indicated above, delicacy of taste is a prerequisite to practice and comparison, so there will surely be stages in each critic’s career when he or she has the required discriminatory abilities but not a sufficient backlog of critical experiences (encounters with works of art). The reverse is also possible; a critic might log many encounters with works of art before his or her delicacy is fully in place. This suggests that for critics, as well as for artists, we should acknowledge what we might deem their juvenilia—verdicts that showcase their skills and promise yet also indicate a lack of maturity.

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In addition, Hume introduces the notion of blameless differences keyed to critics’ differing temperamental and cultural backgrounds. I will examine this important topic in depth in chapter 5 but will note for now that it also supports the idea that the careers of critics, like those of the artists they study, exhibit a developmental arc. Critics’ preferences and judgments change with increasing experience and with the inevitable non-art-related changes and adjustments that come with living a life.11 The concessions elicited so far—that Humean traits are not perfections, are not defined by appeal to thresholds, and are developed over time in ways that vary for each individual—might seem to scuttle the entire enterprise of singling out experts in the arts to whom we should defer. But just as Hume acknowledged a countervailing strand of common sense after documenting the extent of disagreement that divides us in so many spheres, we amateurs can surely acknowledge that for each artist or work we ponder, there could be someone better positioned than ourselves to understand and assess it. Hume’s theory helps us work up a profile for such individuals. Our task is then to seek them out.

vAriATion Among CriTiC s Consider this final two-pronged objection to the picture I am painting of critical virtues. The account of ideal critics is hopelessly relative, an objector might complain; critics will differ widely from one another; and to compound matters, there’s no way we can definitively identify the ideal critics among us. I have granted that critics may possess the Humean traits in differing degrees. Each critic’s particular views will be shaped by his or her accumulated aesthetic and artistic experience—the artists and works encountered, the periods and movements studied—as well as by his or her culture, personality, and more. So there will indeed be a great range of variation among ideal critics. Moreover, since we are building human limitations into this account, no Humean critic will be authoritative about all art. No ideal critic will be the aesthetic version of the Ideal Observer at the heart of Roderick Firth’s proposed moral theory. The limitations of practice and comparison require that critics specialize to some degree. And acknowledging the gradual development of critical skills entails that any two critics we choose to compare might be in quite different stages of this process. So the charge of relativism has some stick. In his paper “Artistic Worth and Personal Taste,” Jerrold Levinson takes up the question of the range of critical expertise, or as he puts it,

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the question of whether any individual might become a comprehensive critic.12 In keeping with the degree of relativism just acknowledged, we must allow that actual critics might pursue very different interests and develop very different areas of expertise. Each critic’s competence will most likely be initially established in a particular artworld niche as she finds herself “called” by specific works. And since critical interests and tastes are not fixed but develop and change over time, we must allow that a critic could simultaneously be an expert in one area while a beginner in another. Levinson acknowledges some of this variability when he says this about the possibility of a “comprehensive ideal critic:” Even though the notion of such a critic is clearly an idealization, there is no reason why it should not be realized, at least to a large extent, in actual individuals. That serious involvement in and appreciation of a given mode of artistic expression invariably or even necessarily precludes comparable involvement in and appreciation of other such modes, significantly removed from the given one in form and content, seems just an unsupported shibboleth of aesthetic defeatism, one that underestimates our capacities to make ourselves receptive to works of art, in whatever mode, that we have reason to believe have something to offer us. (228) Levinson goes on to illustrate the varied interests and disparate sorts of expertise that actual critics might possess. He indicates possible examples for aesthetic multi-tasking when he suggests that different critics at a given time (or the same critic at different times) might be listening to Vivaldi, contemplating Corots, reading Anita Brookner, or watching reruns of Seinfeld (229). Later in that same paper, arguing for equivalence classes of great works, he suggests that ideal critics might equally well find themselves absorbed in Beethoven or John Coltrane or the Rolling Stones (232).

iden Tif ying ideAL CriTiC s 1: Their speCified TrAiT s Even if we accept Levinson’s proposal, the more pressing practical question remains unanswered: if we grant that ideal critics are real rather than ideal, how do we identify the ideal critics among us? Many people will be uttering critical pronouncements, trying to sway us and get us to share their views of specific works, artists, genres, styles. Yet by hypothesis, many of these individuals don’t rise to the status of ideal critic. Because Hume has indicated that such personages are rare, there may be epochs

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when no ideal critic is in place; yet the clamor of critical pronouncements goes on unfettered. For all we know, we live in such a moment right now. One way to tamp down this worry is to reconfigure our sense of what critics actually do. In the Essay Hume focuses on critics’ overall evaluations of individual works and authors. Given his sentiment-based theory, he held that these emerge as outpourings of approbation or disapprobation calibrated to the merits of the works under consideration. I have suggested that a much richer account of critical activity is called for. I favor the central claim of Noël Carroll’s book On Criticism; he insists there that critics are in the business of providing reasoned evaluations. Thus for Carroll critics provide an overall assessment of a work, a thumbs up or thumbs down vote, but this is delivered in a more full-fledged manner than evincing a sentiment. Critics not only tell us whether or not they favor a work but also, according to Carroll, offer elaborate supporting justification. In the introduction I reproduced his list of the tasks involved in critical assessment— description, classification, contextualization, elucidation, interpretation, and analysis—all grounding the final task, evaluation. Again a reminder of how Carroll uses these rather specialized terms. Description is straightforward, it tells appreciators what a work is like. Classification places a work in the appropriate category, where these include genres, movements, styles, and the like, while contextualization looks outward to situate a work in an appropriate socio- cultural (including art-historical and institutional) framework. Elucidation deals with denotation and unpacks semantic difficulties. Interpretation offers an overarching account of a work’s meaning or message (parts of works as well as wholes) while analysis, Carroll’s final item, offers up a broader account of how each work works. I do not in any way mean to suggest that critics self-consciously perform these tasks, let alone that they do so in sequence, and under these descriptions. But I do believe that, in one way or another, effective critics inform us of a work’s constituent properties, set out its proper artworld setting (genre, style, school, etc.), help us with its difficulties, propose and defend an interpretation, point out both flaws and strong points, and indicate the work’s overall significance. And so one way to identify ideal critics among us is to determine which critics and commentators are taking on these tasks.

iden Tif ying ideAL CriTiC s 2: They geT u s To see If we accept a Carrollean view of the practice of criticism, another way we can test whether someone is a genuine ideal critic is to see whether his

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or her arguments are persuasive. Does he or she get us to see important aspects of a work, and does that enlarged vision support the critic’s view of the work’s overall value? This scenario isn’t unlike that put forward by Arnold Isenberg in his much anthologized paper “Critical Communication.” 13 Isenberg there attempts to debunk a somewhat simplistic notion of critical argumentation— one that presupposes the existence of clear norms of artistic worth that allow critics to create deductive arguments of the following form: 1. This work has such-and-such a quality. 2. Any work with such-and-such a quality is pro tanto good. 3. Therefore this work is pro-tanto good. This schema suggests that criticism proceeds by pointing out features of a work that coincide with norms of artistic value. Isenberg’s point is that there are no such norms. With this we have to agree. There are no credible instantiations of premise #2 in the argument schema above. That is, there are no properties of works that are in and of themselves good-making— that is, that even out of context assure artistic goodness. Note that Carroll is not committed to anything so impoverished in claiming that critics engage in reasoned argumentation. But I do think his account is compatible with Isenberg’s revised view according to which critics get us to see as they do. As Isenberg famously put it in the following passage that explains the title of his paper: “it is a function of criticism to bring about communication at the level of the senses, that is, to induce a sameness of vision, of experienced content” (336). Recall the quotation from chapter 2 analogizing effective criticism to birdwatching with an expert who loans one his binoculars. Unfortunately, what I have said to date does not fully extinguish the objections I have imagined. Establishing critics’ bona fides by seeing whether their words persuade us falls short as a test, as it remains hostage to our reasoning skills. A genuine critic might provide an illuminating and helpful account of a difficult work, yet address appreciators who are poor reasoners and who cannot master the complexities of the critic’s argument. Problems also arise when competent critics appeal only to a small claque of sophisticated appreciators, insiders who are in tune with their references, mannerisms, hagiography, and so on. This threatens to fragment the world of art lovers and leave criticism incapable of sustaining the sorts of shared verdicts that anoint great works, support a canon, and in-

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vite truly wide-ranging and lively exchanges about the arts. Can we avoid this outcome by finding some additional measure of critical skill beyond the ability to persuade willing and eager individuals? One possible solution involves appeal to the so- called test of time. Both Hume and contemporary commentators on his Essay employ this strategy. I explore it next.

iden Tif ying ideAL CriTiC s 3: empLoying The Te sT of Time Hume alludes to the test of time when he declares that “the same Homer, who pleased at Athens and Rome two thousand years ago, is still admired at Paris and at London. All the changes of climate, government, religion, and language, have not been able to obscure his glory” (233). As this passage makes clear, the test of time identifies artistic masterpieces in terms of their abiding appeal across times and cultures. Jerrold Levinson has written in helpful detail about Hume’s use of the test of time to accomplish two related tasks—to identify masterpieces but also to flag those special appreciators—ideal critics—who most fully savor them. Levinson proposes three dimensions along which masterpieces endure and flourish. He maintains that their appeal is durable (they are admired over time), wide (they are appreciated across cultures), and broad (they please most of those who engage with them).14 Two of these three dimensions figure in Hume’s paean to Homer. The fact that Homer not only pleased his contemporaries but also found favor in Hume’s era and is still revered today establishes the durability of his work, while the fact that in Hume’s time Homer pleased audiences in both Paris and London—and no doubt in many other European capitals as well—testifies to the width of his appeal. While Hume’s remarks do not specifically cover breadth as Levinson understands it, this tag would apply because Homer’s epic poems speak to enduring human interests and concerns and so are able to captivate many members of any given artworld. Levinson suggests that the test of time can help identify critics who are “reliable indicator[s] . . . of artistic value” (RP, p. 226), and he lauds Mary Mothersill for being the first to “foreground the role that unquestioned exemplars of artistic worth must play in any solution of a Humean sort to the problem of aesthetic objectivity” (RP, p. 232). But, importantly, appeal to the test of time is still not criterial; it does not directly and immediately produce a cohort of ideal critics.15 Here is the dilemma. Since a great many people admire the masterpieces that make up the canon, it is

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not the case that all those who praise the masterpieces of the past— and thereby resemble prior ideal critics—themselves possess this status. Of course ideal critics must appreciate great works. But many other members of their artworld do so as well. Thus masterpieces have many admirers, not all of whom are insightful and discerning. In addition Hume reminds us that ideal critics are rare and hard to find. So, at best, the following guarded claim holds true: being able to properly appreciate a relevant subset of those works that have passed the test of time is necessary but not sufficient for being a Humean ideal critic. (The reference to a relevant subset of masterpieces is meant to accommodate issues about specialization discussed above.) Perhaps we can borrow from Aristotle to separate out the real critics from the pretenders. Recall his claim in the Nicomachean Ethics that virtuous acts are those performed in the right way, at the right time, for the right reason: Virtue aims at the median . . . it is moral virtue that is concerned with emotions and actions, and it is in emotions and actions that excess, deficiency, and the median are found . . . to experience all this at the right time, toward the right objects, toward the right people, for the right reason, and in the right manner—that is the median and the best course, the course that is a mark of virtue.16 If we take a similar approach to aesthetic appreciation, ideal critics are those who admire masterpieces in the right way, for the right reasons, where this involves exercise of the capacities Hume has singled out. Thus the response of ideal critics fully acknowledges the range of each work’s aesthetic properties, is informed by a rich and judiciously selected comparison class, grasps the work’s formal structure and its maker’s goals and intentions, is unimpeded by bias or insularity, and involves unfettered imaginative and emotional response. On this view, ideal critics are those whose admiration marks an established pattern of informed and proper appreciation, where this in turn flows from the five traits specified by Hume together with my two proposed addenda. That a critic is judging in conformity with this analysis—that is, that she is displaying the critical virtues Hume applauds—seems something that can be determined empirically. Even those of us who aren’t ideal critics might be able to tell, “from the outside,” whether these capacities are in play in a given critic’s assessment. This suggests a possible method for identifying the real critics among us.

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The probLem of proJeCTion Unfortunately, this revision to Levinson’s schema still leaves us with a daunting problem of projection: how does facility with past masterpieces guarantee recognition of future worthy works? Levinson maintains that those critics who can reliably identify and explain the great works of the past—works with an appeal that is durable, wide, and broad, in his technical sense of these terms (AW, p. 226)—are the critics we can best trust to recognize contemporary works of similar value. This conclusion follows only if we posit significant continuities between past and present works. Yet in Western artworlds, a premium is placed on innovation and originality. Great works must not just repeat but must build on, extend, and in fact outdo their predecessors. Often great works accomplish this by being revolutionary or transgressive. Levinson is fully aware of these complications. He notes that “artistically good works of art are good in different ways, especially if they are innovative or revolutionary, and that is all the more true for artistically great ones” (RP, p. 233). In such cases the future does not resemble the past in any straightforward fashion. Homage and lines of influence can still be traced, but these come cloaked in distracting layers of contemporary costuming. Morris Weitz, writing in the 1950s, famously argued that because of this emphasis on innovation, art cannot be defined. He claimed that art in general, as well as all the individual arts, are open concepts, ever subject to revision as inventive artists generate new techniques, use new materials, set themselves new problems. For this reason, Weitz declared that “the very expansive, adventurous character of art, its ever-present changes and novel creations, makes it logically impossible to ensure any set of defining properties.” 17 If art can seem an open concept, the individual arts fluid and evolving, it can seem an equally open question whether critics can track value as art evolves. Let us assume that ideal critics appreciate the masterpieces of the past. Of course some qualifications apply. The discussion of specialization in the previous section showed why not every ideal critic admires every great work from the past. Critics’ interests differ, and they have only so much time to accumulate background knowledge and experience to frame their judgments. But by hypothesis, ideal critics fully and deeply understand and appreciate those masterpieces to which they do attend. Appeal to the test of time testifies to our insecurities regarding contemporary art. There are instances, in all the arts, of works and/ or artists that generated an initial buzz and enthusiasm, yet lacked en-

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during value. Consider one of the authors held up by Hume in defense of objectivity in aesthetics—Joseph Addison. His reputation has surely fallen since the publication of the Essay. The poet Ronald Bottrall has suffered a similar fate. F. R. Leavis placed Bottrall alongside Hopkins, Yeats, Eliot, and Pound in his first critical volume New Bearings in English Poetry (1932). But subsequent critics did not join him in this view, and Bottrall is largely overlooked today. For an example of a deflated musical reputation, consider the Italian opera composer Antonio Salieri (1750–1825). Salieri’s decline may have been briefly halted by the popular movie Amadeus. Italian composer and keyboard player Muzio Clementi (1752–1832) was a contemporary of Salieri’s whose initial bright reputation has also fallen; he has not benefited from a similar resuscitation. Equally prevalent are cases of works that were initially scorned, but have now earned a place in the canon. Works by Beethoven, Brahms, and Stravinsky were excoriated when first performed, but are now cherished representatives of late eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century classical composition. Turning to the visual arts, the first Impressionist works by Monet, Renoir, and Pissaro, now revered, were scorned and summarily dismissed when first exhibited in nineteenth- century Paris. The test of time is intended to guard against both types of error. If the enthusiasm for radical change in place in the Western artworld18 invites critical misjudgment on occasion, we need some reassurance that ideal critics, whose appreciation of the qualities and value of artworks of the past is a given, can perform especially well when tasked with understanding and appreciating works of their own time. As it stands, the schematic argument we have been considering involves a glaring non sequitur: 1. Ideal critics are specially positioned to understand and appreciate great artworks of the past. 2. Therefore ideal critics are uniquely positioned to understand and appreciate the artwork of their own time. Happily, attention to pair of theories addressing the question “What is art?” suggests a way to bridge this gap, as both posit continuities linking past and present worthy works. Return to Morris Weitz. His pessimism about the prospects for a real definition of art, one rigorously couched in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions, prompted later theorists to spin accounts that emphasized relational and/or contextual properties of art rather than exhibited

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traits.19 The Institutional theories of George Dickie and Arthur Danto discussed in chapter 2 took this route, defining art in terms of the complex set of roles, practices, beliefs, and expectations that comprise an artworld. But a competing set of historical theories attempted to define contemporary art by telling a genetic tale. They situated works not by looking out to their framing cultural context but by looking back to trace to their evolution from acknowledged art that came before. Two such theories were promulgated by Jerrold Levinson and Noël Carroll.20 Levinson defines art in terms of a continuity of regard, while Carroll proposes that we weave identifying narratives to vet new and controversial works. Adapting this pair of historical theories can fill the logical gap troubling our reconstructed Humean account.

drAwing on T wo hisToriCAL Theorie s In the paper “Defining Art Historically,” Levinson defines art in terms of the continuity of regard. His definition goes through many revisions as he refines his proposal in light of complications and objections. Here is its final resting place: X is an artwork at t = df X is an object of which it is true at t that some person or persons, having the appropriate proprietary right over X, nonpassingly intends (or intended) X for regard-as-work- of-art—i.e., regard in any way (or ways) in which objects in the extension of ‘artwork’ prior to t are or were correctly (or standardly) regarded.21 This definition specifies what it is for something to be an artwork at a given time t; presumably this is relativized to artworlds as well as to times, so what is under consideration is the constitutive relation that a work of art bears to its predecessors at a given time and place. Levinson’s proposal does allow for some degree of revolution if we grant that new media can generate new arts that are regarded in ways very similar to their predecessors. Consider the trajectories from painting to photography to computer art, from drama to film, from drama to performance art, from sculpture to installation art, and so on. But a metaphysical puzzle arises when we try to employ Levinson’s theory, namely, what exactly are regards; how are we to identify and individuate them? Once this puzzle is posed, a bevy of follow-up questions comes to mind. If the trajectories just cited display a

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continuity of regard, what might constitute a break? Should we claim that paintings and films share a common regard, while novels demand a different one? Absent a robust account of what constitutes a regard, there seems some danger that regards reduce to the mere use of a given sensory modality. Moreover, how fine-grained should we take regards to be? Is the appropriate regard one and the same for all films: fiction or documentary, frightening or pastoral? Might film connoisseurs employ different regards while watching the work of different filmmakers? If a film is based on a novel, should the regard with which we address the film somehow acknowledge the regard its literary predecessor received or demanded? Consideration of the Authentic Performance Practice movement among musicians indicates some of the complexity that should get folded into the notion of a regard. This movement is all about differences in the way, say, Bach’s audience heard his music compared to the experiences of audiences today. These differences are fueled by differences in knowledge and expectations—in fact, by the entire intervening history of Western classical music—as well as by differences in the instruments producing the sounds and in the acoustics of the spaces in which they were played. Employing Levinson’s terminology, we might say that the movement is all about recapturing earlier modes of regard. Perhaps in considering the regards that greeted works at their time and place of origin, we should recognize collective or cultural regards, shared by audience members in the know. And finally, in considering regards we should also ask whether some sort of normativity is in place. Do we err in addressing a work via an incorrect regard? What sort of appreciative damage might result? Levinson proposes one distinction that might aid our understanding of these issues. He allows both an opaque and a transparent reading of “regard.” On the referentially opaque interpretation of intending for regard-asa-work-of-art, the intender is aware of continuity with past ways of treating art, while such awareness is not present in the referentially transparent interpretation which Levinson glosses as follows: “intending for regard in some specific way Φ, where Φ is in fact a way in which some past artworks have been correctly regarded, though this fact is not known to the intender.”22 The distinction between transparent and opaque was introduced by W. V. O. Quine to facilitate his discussion of contexts where substitution of co-referential terms becomes problematic.23 Belief ascription is one such context. If we ascribe beliefs to others using terms they themselves could not access or acknowledge, we treat belief ascription as refer-

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entially transparent. By contrast, if we formulate others’ beliefs using only claims and concepts they could in fact employ, we create a referentially opaque ascription. This distinction transfers to any situation where another’s epistemic store is being assessed as it were “from the outside.” The point that emerges from this discussion is that regards should not simply be modes of perception, they have cognitive content as well. Adopting a proper regard toward a work of art allows one to note its properties, consider its art-historical context, speculate about its meaning, and more. While Levinson’s discussion of the two interpretations of regard, transparent and opaque, primarily intended these distinctions to apply to artmakers, I believe they apply to critics as well. Moreover, it seems clear that the generosity involved in the transparent reading shouldn’t extend to Humean ideal critics. They should be aware of the lineage of the works they judge. That is, transparent regards should be rejected in the critical case. We should insist that ideal critics are aware of the manner in which they take in and assess candidate works and of the historical grounding of their choices. Such self-awareness should be a natural by-product of their accumulated practice and comparison. Questions were raised above about the normativity of regard. In considering how works are properly regarded, we should ask what that regard retrieves. And if we grant that how a work is regarded in Levinson’s sense involves considerably more than flagging the relevant sensory modality, then we should enlarge upon Levinson’s enthymematic account. I suggest this can be done most effectively by drawing on another version of the Historical theory, that proposed by Noël Carroll.24 Carroll’s account of the origin story that must be spun for troubling contemporary works allows us to elaborate on the cognitive content of appropriate regard. Carroll jumps into the longstanding philosophical discussion about the definition of art with a distinctive concern. He wants to know how the artworld should welcome its avant-garde. Carroll believes that we find avantgarde works deeply troubling. He repeatedly refers to such works as mutations,25 this biological metaphor suggesting not only that avant-garde works are anomalous but also that they pose a threat to the art-historical tradition. Thus Carroll wants to know how art that is unexpected, offputting, revolutionary, can be accommodated and how genuine works can be sorted from pretenders.26 To this end Carroll urges us to construct what he calls identifying narratives linking accepted art to the avant-garde works we hope to vet. The narratives’ Aristotelian structure—beginning, middle, end—allows us to tie challenging contemporary works to the es-

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tablished art that came before. Such tales start in an earlier artworld moment, anchoring the narrative arc to an accepted work, style, movement, or tradition. The narrative’s middle section details the changes that must be rung on the conventions and expectations previously in place in order to allow the controversial avant-garde work to emerge. The creation of that work marks the end of the tale. Consider an example. Henry Moore’s bronze Reclining Figure (1969–70) currently sitting on Columbia University’s Morningside campus is both massive and highly abstract. Moore sculpted a great many recumbent females from the 1930s on, so the piece has important predecessors within Moore’s own oeuvre. But the sort of identifying narrative Carroll envisions seeks to anchor Reclining Figure much more securely in the history of western art. So we might trace a genealogy ranging back to Bernini’s Ecstasy of St. Theresa from the seventeenth century. Middle steps could include Auguste Rodin’s The Kiss (1882), Constantin Brancusi’s vastly simplified and abstract treatment of that very same subject (1913), Gaston Lachaise’s inflated Floating Figure (1927), Aristide Maillot’s prone nude La Rivière (1943), Jean Arp’s biomorphic bronze Torse des Pyrénées (1959), all culminating in Moore’s massive work. As we traverse the examples that make up the identifying narrative, all aspects of Moore’s piece, including those that seem controversial, are introduced and vetted. In explaining his view, Carroll notes that the most common way to prove that something is art is to “tell a story that connects the disputed work with preceding artmaking contexts in such a way that the production of x can be seen as an intelligible outcome of recognizable processes of thinking and making within the practice” (IA 84). He further glosses this activity as “telling a certain kind of story . . . namely, a historical narrative of how x came to be produced as an intelligible response to an antecedent art-historical situation” (IA 85). Both these passages require that bona fide artists possess at least some minimal historical understanding of the artistic tradition within which they have chosen to work. Carroll spells out the components of such understanding in the following passage: The artist learns the tradition, or at least crucial parts of it, in the course of learning certain procedures of production, along with their attending folkways, self-understanding, rules of thumb, associated values, and even theories. In producing artworks, the artist remains in conversation with her teachers—sometimes repeating, sometimes improving upon, and sometimes disputing their achievements. But in every instance, the

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artist is always involved in extending the tradition; typically, even the artist who repudiates large portions of it does so in order to return it to what she perceives as its proper direction. (IA 86)27 Since the middle portion of an identifying narrative draws on the traditions and practices shaping production within a given artworld, Carroll assumes that artists are generally aware of this transmitted artistic legacy; in both their training and their subsequent artmaking they knowingly work within and respond to the ongoing/framing artistic tradition. Thus Carroll’s account aligns with the opaque reading proposed above for Levinson’s theory. Some theorists speak of the essential historicity of art to flag the fact that not everything is possible at every time.28 We might then say that Carrollian identifying narratives demonstrate the parameters of possibility in a given artworld. Importantly for our project, Carroll requires historical understanding not only of artists who create works but also of critics who evaluate them. He proposes that “the task of the critic who champions the work in question is to place it in a framework that will render its connections with acknowledged portions of the tradition intelligible” (IA 83). Presumably Humean ideal critics, with their store of art-historical knowledge and experience (again flowing from the practice and comparison requirements), would be especially well positioned to spin the required tales. Nonetheless, critical narratives can be expected to proliferate. We need to decide how to choose among them. Difficulties emerged when we pressed the notion of a regard at the center of Levinson’s theory; troubles also arise when we consider Carroll’s central posit. Appeal to Aristotelian unities and to Aristotle’s remarks about the inevitability of a persuasive plot might allow us to identify narratives and formulate minimum standards for their coherence. But how are we to judge narrative adequacy? We can always imagine competing narratives, equally well-grounded in the current artworld, offering a quite different justification (lineage) for a given work. We can also imagine a more radical disjunction, where competing narratives start at the same place but lead toward incompatible futures. What then makes an identifying narrative unacceptable? It seems possible that critics correctly moored with regard to judgments of past art take a wrong turn in charting what is to come. Such critics could create Carrollian narratives linking past masterpieces to less than worthy present or future works.

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The miLLiAn reQuiremen T A further safeguard is required to ensure that critics guide us to the most valuable art and the most rewarding aesthetic experience. Fortunately, we can turn again to Levinson to fill this gap in the account currently under construction. In his discussion of the test of time, Levinson borrows from John Stuart Mill’s method for sorting pleasures according to quality. Recall that in chapter 2 of Utilitarianism, Mill quiets the objection that utilitarianism is a doctrine worthy of swine by insisting that pleasures differ in quality and that those with experience of both will choose the more rarified and more rewarding intellectual pleasures over lower bodily-based delights. Levinson explicitly invokes this precedent in summarizing his revised Humean account: “For as John Stuart Mill famously observed . . . the best, and possibly the only, evidence of one satisfaction or experience being better than another is the considered and decided preference for the one over the other by those fully acquainted with and appreciative of both” (AW, p. 227). Levinson creates an aesthetic version of Mill’s claim by privileging the choices of critics who have experienced both worthy and less worthy works. He explains the result as follows: “The criterion of better aesthetic experiences is basically a matter of whether you would choose to go back to your former appreciative condition once you had arrived at your present one” (RP, pp. 235–36). Let us call this the Millian Requirement. The reference to going back is crucial here. What seals the value of the enhanced new ranking is that critics don’t circle back and reinstate the works that they have come to find inferior. The Millian Requirement speaks not only to the class of great works but also to the depth of experience and high standards required of an ideal critic. Levinson’s gloss suggests that the Millian Requirement is best understood on the model of a ratchet. Once a higher quality aesthetic pleasure is identified, the revised ranking prevails. While critics may occasionally relax with lesser and/or escapist works, they make and maintain judgments that appropriately rank the new works they encounter. The preferred work is acknowledged to be higher in quality than the one it replaced, even if lesser quality works are revisited. Thus the application of the Millian principle in aesthetic contexts is not vexed by the backsliding that plagues recovering alcoholics and drug addicts. Admittedly, few connoisseurs devote themselves unremittingly to the appreciation of the finest art. Levinson is realistic about the balance most

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of us seek in the pleasures we pursue. At the very end of his 2002 paper, he acknowledges the lures of other pleasures when he asks why anyone might spend all her time with great art rather than “some combination of windsurfing, motorcycling, parenting, communing with nature, doing good works, practicing yoga, touring Europe, exploring Asian cuisine, and learning to master Godel’s proof?” (RP, p. 236). While he doesn’t provide a definitive response here, Levinson returns to this issue and offers a fuller reply in his later paper “Artistic Worth and Personal Taste,” noting that many of us might seek down time away from masterpieces: “There are all sorts of contingencies of availability, of competing interests, of required duties—in short, myriad other aspects of our life situations” that create a need for variation in any person’s daily and overall life pursuits (AW, p. 229). Yet when ideal critics are attending to worthy works of art, their judgments are definitive. Levinson insists that because of their wide experience as well as their ability to properly appreciate masterpieces, ideal critics are our best indicators of general artistic value. He employs a series of vivid metaphors to make this point, assimilating such critics to a litmus test, a barometer, and in the end to truffle pigs (RP, pp. 233, 234). How are we to square the workings of the Millian Requirement with our oft-repeated insistence on the gradual development of critical preference? Expertise is built as appreciators engage in thoughtful and probing encounters with works of art, grounding recognition of styles, genres, schools, and movements as well as tendencies and trends within individual artists’ careers. This process may also encourage critics to reevaluate previously encountered works. To offer a legal analogy, critics will at times opt to vacate earlier verdicts. Reconsideration can bring about the ascription of new aesthetic properties, the proposal of new interpretations, the tracing of new lines of influence. New experiences can also prompt appreciators to place works in an enlarged cohort and to view them through the lens of subsequent artworld developments. Any or all of these goings- on can lead critics to change their overall assessments of certain works. Together these concessions might seem to threaten the ratchet model deemed essential to our understanding of the Millian Requirement. Here is why that model stands. Suppose an ideal critic comparing two works at t1 judges work A superior to work B. She might revisit this assessment in light of the sorts of reasons just discussed. Her prior ranking of the works could change if, on consideration, she decided to demote A, or to elevate B, or to put in place both these evaluative changes. The end result is that our critic now finds work B superior to work A. Has she then vi-

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olated the spirit of the Millian Requirement, as captured by Levinson’s remark about resisting return to a former appreciative state? Our critic is not guilty of the sort of backsliding Levinson hoped to guard against because she is not forsaking a higher pleasure for a lower one. She may have previously valued A more than B, but she now has good and compelling reasons for reversing this ranking. In this regard, she is not like the alcoholic who falls off the wagon or the addict repeatedly sent to rehab. Those individuals cannot argue for the value of gin or heroin, they pursue these despite knowing their perils. Our critic’s possession of reasons differentiates her from those who violate Mill’s tenets. At any given time, she can construct a reason-based qualitative ranking that ensures she is privileging the more worthy work. That is, though her ranking at time t2 undoes that proposed at t1, at both times she honors the sorts of evaluative considerations that we’ve built into our account of a Humean ideal critic. For any given t, she can cite persuasive reasons to defend the ranking she proposes. While we have acknowledged two factors—maturation and reconsideration—that can bring it about that ideal critics adjust their rankings and preferences, the resulting diachronic changes don’t alter the fact that at any given time our Humean critic functions like a Levinsonian truffle pig, identifying and characterizing worthy works.

C onCLu sion Our discussion to date has shown that the notion of an ideal critic we have extracted from Hume’s Essay is realizable; individuals of this sort can indeed exist. And we can employ a checklist of sorts to see if there are any ideal critics among us. We have considered a number of ways of identifying such experts. While none proved sufficient to definitively pick out a cohort of Humean critics, each carries some weight, and employing them all can make it considerably more likely that we attend to truly authoritative critical voices (though we must always leave open the possibility a given generation lacks any such representatives). To review: we can ask whether the critics around us exhibit the five traits Hume specified as well as the emotional and imaginative capacities we added to that list. We can focus in to make sure that those individuals fully and persuasively champion great works from the past. We can carefully monitor our own use of their critical advice to see whether they persuade us to share their judgments and also whether those judgments prove illuminating, encouraging us to find unexpected depths in the works they recommend as well as

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good reason to reject those they condemn. We can reset our expectations so that we assume critics will specialize and assume that their views will develop and mature over time. And finally, we can honor our allegiance to the Millian Requirement by demanding that critics have the breadth of experience to place each valued work in an appropriate comparison class and present compelling arguments to show why each prevails. Assuming that there are some members of our artworld who can fill the role we are carving out here, our interest inevitably turns to the phenomenon that so occupied Hume at the start of his Essay, namely, the prospect of critical disagreement. Should we find that the exemplars who model Hume’s characterization quarrel among themselves, their advice considered overall is not effective. The verdicts even among those specializing in the same schools, movements, artists, and so on, will fail to converge. Though we may have shrunk the number of critical voices among which we must choose, our judgments remain untethered unless we can single out just which individuals merit our attention and allegiance. In the next two chapters I will explore relations among critics and among those they advise. The topic of chapter 5 will be critical disagreement, while chapter 6 will consider the phenomenon of shared taste.

5 · When Critics Disagree

This chapter examines disagreement between ideal critics and the prospects for realism in aesthetics. Hume’s posit of blameless differences, his supposition that appreciators are inevitably drawn to different works based on differences in the appreciators’ temperament and the manners and cultures of their time, occupies center stage. I formalize and assess two opposing views regarding critical disagreement, Alan Goldman’s argument for non-realism in aesthetics and Jerold Levinson’s argument for realism. Surprisingly, everything turns on whether or not the descriptive and evaluative aspects of aesthetic qualities are separable. When two critics disagree as to whether a work, or an aspect or section of a work, is delicate or insipid—the example is based on Sibley’s discussion of aesthetic qualities—we need to determine whether the disputants are perceiving the same quality but evaluating it differently (Levinson’s claim) or discerning two distinct qualities whose descriptive and evaluative aspects are inextricably linked (Goldman’s proposal). I propose that this debate leads to a verificationist impasse. I canvas four possible solutions to this impasse: attending closely to Hume’s wording in introducing blameless differences, maintaining that disputants are talking by one another unless they are discussing aesthetic properties experienced in common (inference to the best explanation in action), reconfiguring our understanding of aesthetic qualities in light of aesthetic empiricism, and introducing the insights of recent empirical work on aesthetic preference. Since none of these approaches succeeds, I urge that we put in place a Suitability Requirement: critics ought only assess works of types capable of interesting them.

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The probLem Let me review our progress to date and the problem that confronts anyone trying to defend a neo-Humean account of aesthetic judgment. We have conceded that not all appreciators are on par. Some individuals have refined powers of discrimination, highly developed analytical and communicative skills,1 unassailable integrity, as well as robust background knowledge of the arts to which they attend. They are the candidate Humean true judges or ideal critics. We have reason to defer to their opinions and let them guide us in this realm. But what if a number of such individuals disagree among themselves? We have not yet tested Hume’s claim that the verdicts of such individuals will converge. Should this fail, then the promise of Hume’s theory is not borne out. More important, realism in aesthetics is in question. This last consequence needs unpacking. At issue is whether our claims about art are verifiable, grounded in fact and supported by appeal to accessible evidence, or whether they are instead subjective and radically relative, with each individual opinion as good as any other. This is the dilemma Hume foregrounded when he opened his Essay with a discussion of disagreement. Some of our activities seem to support the realist claim. Aesthetic disputes are commonplace; arguing about art is a major source of entertainment and edification. Moreover, there is a clear justificatory structure in place for such exchanges. I started chapter 2 with a sketch of that structure.2 Yet a problem remains about the objective force of aesthetic claims. While such statements as “The cat is on the mat,” “The outside temperature is 92 degrees,” and “The half-life of uranium 235 is 713 million years” strike us as verifiable matters of fact, the statements “The cabernet is complex,” “The opening theme is assertive,” and “The plot is contrived” seem contestable, varying with each speaker’s interests and experience. Absent laws of taste, how can we secure the truth of these latter claims? Note that I have located this worry as pertaining not to summary verdicts and evaluations, but rather to the assignment of any and all aesthetic properties to works of art. This is in keeping with the treatment of aesthetic properties in chapter 2 above. I suggested there that such properties are “where the action is” when it comes to justifying interpretive and summary claims about works of art. If we cannot secure agreement here, then works of art acquire an unfortunate status. They are worse off, metaphysically and ontologically, than ordinary objects, because they possess their properties tendentiously at best. Is there any way to push

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back against this worry and secure at least some degree of aesthetic realism? In this chapter I will consider disagreement among ideal critics and put in place some restrictions that weigh in favor of the realist point of view.

hume on bL AmeLe ss differenCe s In his essay on taste, Hume allows for two quite different sources of critical disagreement. We have already discussed the first, which stems from conditions of appreciation.3 Recall Hume’s claim that our aesthetic responses are “tender and delicate” and his warnings that the “least exterior hindrance to such small springs, or the least internal disorder, disturbs their motion, and confounds the operation of the whole machine” (270). We catalogued possible external hindrances and internal disorders and endorsed Hume’s implied conclusion. Critics as well as ordinary appreciators can correctly judge works of art only when their personal circumstances as well as the external conditions framing each aesthetic encounter are apt for the appreciative task at hand.4 Care should be taken to get these matters right. The second source of variation also applies to both amateurs and experts, but its effects cannot be so easily mitigated. The range of variation must simply be built into our theory. Hume introduces this second category with this remark that we visited briefly at the end of chapter 3: “There still remain two sources of variation, which are not sufficient indeed to confound all the boundaries of beauty and deformity, but will often serve to produce a difference in the degrees of our approbation or blame. The one is the different humors of particular men; the other, the particular manners and opinions of our age and country” (280). Such temperamental and cultural variations will in all likelihood make different critics prefer different works. That is, gloomy critics will be drawn to grim and pessimistic works, Pollyannas to happy endings; young, passionate critics will favor amorous plots, older reflective readers more philosophical tales; and critics everywhere will favor works from their own time and culture. The changes we have acknowledged as each critic’s taste evolves and matures further complicate this tale, as particular critics might be in synch with one another in some stages of their appreciative journeys but not align in others. Hume goes on to deem all such disagreements blameless differences in taste, as they do not undermine the participants’ status as ideal critics.5 But they do appear to threaten aesthetic realism. Is it the case that ideal critics will

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disagree about the aesthetic qualities of particular works—and so about meaning, interpretation, and overall worth as well— owing to their temperamental and cultural differences? Let us focus on a sample aesthetic dispute, one that turns on aesthetic qualities. One individual appreciator deems a work delicate, another pronounces it insipid. I borrow the opposing terms from Sibley’s paper “Aesthetic Concepts.” To keep the participants on a par, assume that each is an ideal critic. Since they disagree, they presumably differ in taste. But we are attending to differences of the sort that Hume called blameless, those stemming from variations of temperament or of culture. Perhaps one critic is predisposed to favor, the other to reject, the constellation of qualities that subvene the aesthetic quality in question. Perhaps the critics differ on whether those qualities advance what they take the artist to be trying to accomplish. Perhaps they even differ on the merits of the artist’s overall goal. In each case, however, there will be constraints on the arguments each critic can muster. Capable critics justify ascription of aesthetic qualities by citing descriptive features suited to subvening them. Call this the Scope Restriction. No ideal critic will maintain, “It’s gaudy because of the subtle patterning and bland coloration” or “It’s delicate because of the heavy impasto and thick, jagged black lines.” Instead, reference to bright and clashing colors justifies an ascription of gaudiness, while an ascription of delicacy must make mention of light textures, curving lines, and the like. Critics who fail to comply commit errors of scope. But this restriction also places limits on debates between critics. In ascribing aesthetic qualities to works of art, dueling critics can meaningfully disagree only about examples that depend on one and the same set of base (or subvening) qualities. Thus “delicate or insipid?,” “delicate or effete?,” or “delicate or anemic?” are all disagreements that might engage ideal critics, but “delicate or garish?” is not, as the presence of these two aesthetic properties would be justified by reference to distinctly different complexes of underlying base properties. Of course we must complicate matters by noting that the sorts of debates I am ruling out can take hold if critics are discussing different regions or different aspects of a given work. How are we to explain the impasse at which we arrive when one ideal critic declares a passage in a painting (or in a musical work, a ballet, a poem) delicate while another declares it insipid? Have the two critics experienced one and the same aesthetic quality, and in addition the first likes it and the second dislikes it? Or has their differing taste caused them to actually perceive two different aesthetic qualities? Let me proceed by dissecting a

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contemporary discussion of this issue, an extended debate between Alan Goldman and Jerrold Levinson regarding aesthetic realism.6 These two philosophers offer starkly different accounts of what goes on when ideal critics disagree. Goldman believes that differences in taste prompt them to ascribe different aesthetic qualities to the works, while Levinson insists that they ascribe the same aesthetic quality but evaluate it differently. Thus Goldman endorses nonrealism in aesthetics, while Levinson plumps for realism. I believe this outcome is determined early on by each participant’s take on a seemingly minor matter, namely, the presence and eliminability of an evaluative dimension to aesthetic properties. Let me indicate how the debate between Goldman and Levinson unfolds and show why the evaluative/descriptive issue assumes center stage.

when CriTiC s disAgree 1: g oLdmAn’s Argumen T for nonreALism Goldman’s jumping- off point is clearly Humean; he titles the section in which he defines aesthetic properties “The Humean Structure” (21). Goldman believes that a work’s aesthetic qualities—any of the eight varieties noted in chapter 2— causally depend on its base qualities, where these include “formal, expressive, representational (including symbolic), sensuous, and historical properties of works” (46).7 What tilts Goldman toward nonrealism is his belief that ideal critics differ in taste8 (I take it this point flows from Hume’s account of blameless differences) and that aesthetic judgments must be relativized accordingly: When I say that an object has a certain aesthetic property, I am saying that ideal critics who generally share my taste will react in a certain way to its more basic properties. When ascriptions of properties are relativized to tastes in this way, the truth of those statements is no longer independent of the ways the properties appear to critics with those tastes. Hence the analysis is no longer realist. (37) Moreover, Goldman believes that the specific disagreements of ideal critics have to do with evaluative response rather than with perceptual or phenomenal experience: What one critic finds gaudy another will not find subtle or bland but may find bold and striking. What impresses one as sprightly and deli-

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cate will not impress another as heavy and plodding but might be perceived as flippant and slightly insipid or lacking in substance. These examples suggest that the critics agree in their perceptions of the objective (nonevaluative), formal properties of the works in question but disagree in their evaluative responses to those properties. (33) Finally, Goldman does not believe that aesthetic properties can be broken down into evaluative and nonevaluative components (25–26). Defining aesthetic properties in terms of a Humean schema in which evaluative response plays an ineliminable role (“Object O has aesthetic property P = O is such as to elicit response of kind R in ideal viewers of kind V in virtue of its more basic properties B” [21]), he posits a chain of justifications.9 Critics justify the attribution of aesthetic properties by noting the presence of properties that are less evaluative and more descriptive. The attribution of these new properties is justified by citing further properties that are even less evaluative. With repeated iterations, the evaluative force of aesthetic judgment is gradually discharged.10 The argument for nonrealism that I’ve ascribed to Goldman follows quite simply from the fact that ideal critics differ in taste, together with the assumption that aesthetic qualities cannot be separated into descriptive and evaluative components. Here is a compact formalization: 1. Humean ideal critics differ—blamelessly—in taste. 2. Differences in taste will cause ideal critics to like and dislike different works. 3. Aesthetic properties contain inextricably linked descriptive and evaluative aspects. 4. Ideal critics who like and dislike different works will ascribe different aesthetic properties to works of art. 5. Therefore, aesthetic realism cannot be sustained. Goldman’s discussion underlines an important aspect of the debate about critical disagreement. His examples in the second passage quoted above highlight the Scope Restriction in action and remind us that certain critical claims just won’t fly. Since aesthetic qualities supervene (Levinson) or causally depend (Goldman) on a work’s non-aesthetic qualities, critics’ aesthetic ascriptions must be properly grounded. This restriction comports with the account of aesthetic justification endorsed above.

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when CriTiC s disAgree 2: Levins on’s Argumen T for reALism In a series of papers, Jerrold Levinson attempts to reestablish aesthetic realism. He believes that for the most part, thick aesthetic qualities lack an evaluative dimension. For any quality that seems to carry a positive or negative valence, we can think of some artistic context in which that expectation is cancelled. For example, Levinson notes that delicacy and grace, generally welcome qualities of works, would not contribute positively to a monument to the victims of Babi Yar.11 Levinson also dismisses the possibility that aesthetic qualities acquire their evaluative dimensions as a result of being “inherently pleasant or unpleasant.” 12 But most important—and this sets his view apart from Goldman’s—Levinson thinks all this back-and-forth about an evaluative component is beside the point, because in any aesthetic debate we can always isolate a descriptive core that constitutes the aesthetic quality. In the paper “What Are Aesthetic Properties,” he declares: I want to acknowledge only to put aside an aspect of aesthetic attributions which for many writers looms larger than any other, namely, their putative evaluative dimension. I will be assuming that the core of an aesthetic attribution is a descriptive content, and hence that such attributions, whatever their evaluative force, also centrally purport to ascribe properties. (5) In the paper just cited, Levinson gives a fuller characterization of such qualities. He deems them higher-order ways of appearing, where “ways of appearing” is the general category to which Levinson assigns properties,13 and “higher- order” is meant to flag the supervenience relation in which they stand to non-aesthetic or base-level qualities. Thus, to return to the example discussed during the exposition of Sibley’s view, the delicacy of a pink, filigreed, and curvilinear item would be, for Levinson, a complex overall impression, taken in through the senses and not reducible to a concatenation of the three base traits that give rise to it. He maintains that whenever critics disagree, even if they wield terms that seem to “include an evaluative component irreducibly,” we can with some confidence assume “the presence of an aesthetic property to which they advert in common, and not just complexes of non-aesthetic ones. . . . The fact that we

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often lack a single word of neutral cast to refer to the experiential territory descriptively shared proves little” (“APEF” 65). One phrase in the passage just quoted—“an aesthetic property to which they advert in common”—is key to Levinson’s realism, as it establishes that warring critics are discussing one and the same aesthetic property. We can offer a formalization of Levinson’s argument, comparable to the one offered earlier to capture Goldman’s view: 1. Humean ideal critics differ—blamelessly—in taste. 2. Differences in taste will cause ideal critics to like and dislike different works. 3. Aesthetic properties are higher-level impressions triggered by but not reducible to constellations of base properties. 4. Ideal critics who disagree about a given aspect of a work are experiencing the same aesthetic property but evaluating it differently. 5. Therefore, aesthetic realism can be maintained.

A verifiCATionisT impA sse ? Now that we have set out Goldman’s and Levinson’s views, is there any way to resolve their debate about aesthetic realism? In an earlier symposium paper, Levinson explicitly diagnoses the error he takes Goldman to have made in his analysis of disagreement between ideal critics. For Goldman there is nothing between “objective formal properties of the works in question” and “evaluative responses to those properties.” But this just fails to recognize that there are higher- order perceptual properties, deserving the label “aesthetic,” which supervene on the formal and sensory ones, and which qualified parties to a critical dispute grasp in common.14 Levinson thus attributes to Goldman a two-part schema: (1) formal properties of works and (2) evaluative responses to those properties, while he instead recognizes a three-level structure: (1) formal properties of works, (2) aesthetic properties supervening on those (and taken in as higherlevel/overall impressions), and (3) evaluative responses to that middle level. Levinson summarily dismisses Goldman’s account, saying Goldman “just fails to recognize” the presence of this crucial middle level. But

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Levinson’s view seems vulnerable to the equally dismissive rejoinder that he simply begs the question for realism in positing this feature (level (b) above). To adjudicate this debate, we need some way to get at the warring critics’ experiences. Are they or are they not aware of a higher-level overall impression or effect that they experience in common? Return to the sample dispute that I have foregrounded: a disagreement about whether a particular passage—musical, painted, poetic—is delicate or insipid. Can appeals to introspection determine whether the critics are experiencing the same quality yet judging it differently (Levinson) or experiencing different qualities (Goldman)? Asking the critics to introspect and describe their mental goings-on won’t give us the desired window into their experience. We already know that they will offer different words to characterize the work (“delicate” and “insipid”); we also know that they are grounding their judgments in perception of the same subset of the work’s base properties. Their delicacy of taste—the first trait of a Humean ideal critic— ensures that they will register these correctly. Yet no amount of questioning seems likely to reveal the critics’ phenomenal or qualitative experiences. These seem forever unavailable to us. In the course of defending his view, Levinson discusses and critiques Daniel Dennett’s paper “Quining Qualia.” 15 Presumably, he feels he needs to defend qualia from Dennett’s attack because they are the most plausible candidate to occupy the middle tier of his three-level schema. That is, qualia could in fact be higher- order ways of appearing that are immediately available to experience. Levinson focuses on two of the “intuition pumps” offered up by Dennett. Both involve changing preferences for a given taste. The first presents a pair of coffee tasters who no longer like their company’s product; the second features someone who takes a pill that cures his loathing for cauliflower.16 The riddle in each case is whether (1) the taste has stayed the same over time while the taster’s standards have changed, or (2) the taste has changed, but the taster’s standards have not.17 Our “delicate or insipid?” puzzle poses similar questions about two appreciators at one time. Dennett’s riddles could be rewritten for the aesthetic case as follows: (1) is the experience the same, but the critics’ evaluative responses differ, or (2) is the experience different for each critic, though their response set is similar? Assimilating our quarrelling critics to the cauliflower loather before and after taking the drug emphasizes the seeming qualitative difference in their experiences; assimilating them to

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the coffee tasters might instead invite us to focus on different standards or responses. But in the end, championing one or another of these intuitions, no matter how loudly, does nothing to establish their truth. We arrive at a now familiar verificationist impasse. To decide between the rival theories and analyses under consideration, we need to get at and sample the experiences of our warring critics, of Dennett’s weary coffee tasters, of the cauliflower hater after he’s popped the magic pill. But there’s no way we can get direct access to their mental lives; we can only draw inferences based on their testimony and their circumstances. Are there ways around this impasse? In the sections that follow, I will briefly survey five possible solutions and argue that only the last is viable.

s oLu Tion 1: AT Tending CLo seLy To hume’s word s A close reading of Hume provides one possible way to resolve the dilemma just stated. Recall the exact phrasing he used to characterize the notion of blameless differences. He spoke of “two sources of variation, which are not sufficient indeed to confound all the boundaries of beauty and deformity, but will often serve to produce a difference in the degrees of our approbation or blame” (243). What might he mean when he says these differences among critics will not confound the boundaries of beauty and deformity? Here’s one candidate interpretation: these differences will not bring about any gerrymandering of our antecedent notions of aesthetic value. And the reason is given in Hume’s next phrase: they will produce only differences of degree, not differences in kind. That is, Hume seems to here predict that blameless differences in taste will cause ideal critics to more emphatically like or dislike what they were already predisposed to judge that way, but it will not cause them to cross over, won’t make critics champion what they would otherwise have disliked, or vice versa. And so the valence of their views will always align. Since delicacy is, other things equal, a desirable aesthetic quality, insipidity an unwelcome one, ideal critics will either agree in finding a given work praiseworthy and delicate, or agree in finding it wanting and insipid.18 But two ideal critics will not find themselves on opposite sides of this evaluative divide. I feel confident that this is a plausible reading of the passage under discussion. And in fact Malcolm Budd proposes this very interpretation in the opening chapter of his book Values of Art. Discussing Hume’s Essay, Budd remarks, “Hume is not unaware that the requirements a true judge must satisfy fail to ensure uniformity of response. He believes, however,

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that these two conditions rule out all but two sources of variation—‘the different humours of particular men’ and ‘the particular manners and opinions of our age and country’—and these two sources, he asserts, can affect only the degree of the sentiment, not its agreeable or disagreeable nature.” 19 In sum, I do not think that Hume believed that blameless differences would undermine aesthetic realism as we have been understanding it.20 But while this is all very well and good as biographical fact and/or literary interpretation—that is, while it may indeed capture Hume’s actual view—it offers us no reason whatsoever to think that view correct. No argument is offered for the supposition that blameless differences are not strong enough to undermine realism. And so this line of thought will not provide the remedy we seek.

s oLu Tion 2: inferenCe To The be sT expL AnATion Another possibility is that we try an “end run” or more round-about way of adjudicating the realist/non-realist debate. I have suggested that Levinson begs the question for realism when he posits, for every aesthetic dispute, a higher-level impression that carries the shared descriptive content. But this picture could be supported via an inference-to-the-best- explanationstyle argument, one showing that realism provides the better explanation of our art-related practices overall, including a better explanation of aesthetic disagreement, the feature with which we began. Noël Carroll offers just such an argument in the section on aesthetic properties in his book Philosophy of Art. Starting with the example of two people disagreeing about how to describe a color (light beige versus light gray), Carroll states that “in order to be really disagreeing, our two disputants must be disagreeing about the same thing” (194)—in this case, the same color (“an objective, response- dependent property of the object under observation” [195]). Extending the argument to aesthetic disputes, Carroll claims that “where one critic says that the drawing is delicate and the other says that it is bland, the most reasonable hypothesis is that they are disagreeing about the best description of a property of an object that they are both experiencing” (195). And he takes the principle that “disagreement always presupposes agreement of some sort” to support aesthetic realism, since the “best posit here is that [disputants] are disagreeing about the objective aesthetic properties of the objects under contestation” (195). Carroll also argues that positing the existence of objective aesthetic qualities provides

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a better explanation of, among other things, the frequent convergence of aesthetic claims (192– 93), our ability to learn the meaning and use of aesthetic terms (p. 196), and the possibility of “aesthetic revelation” (197). Carroll is trying to counter the skeptic who maintains that aesthetic properties are projections. I buy into the premise that genuine disagreement requires some point of underlying agreement. Otherwise the participants are simply talking by one another. But is Carroll entitled to the conclusion that aesthetic properties are where agreement rests? Wouldn’t the “traction” of aesthetic argument be equally well secured by agreement about base properties rather than supposed properties they support? If so, then realists need some further argument to show that the site of agreement is indeed higher-level aesthetic properties. They probably owe us as well some explanation of the metaphysics of those properties. Granted, the balance might tip in favor of aesthetic realism if we could offer an increasingly long list of aspects of our aesthetic practice that are best explained by the posit of objective aesthetic qualities. But some of the dilemmas we’ve already visited return when we try to create such a list. For example, Carroll proposes that aesthetic concepts like “powerful” are learned through ostension (196). Moreover, he claims that for such lessons to work, “people need to be picking out the same kind of thing by the concept; we need to be attending to the same feature of the relevant objects that our tutors are” (196). But doesn’t this return us to the verificationist impasse explored above? The experiences of tutor and pupil are subject to just the same competing interpretations that Goldman and Levinson proposed for the experiences of warring critics. An example that leads to the very same problems, raises the very same questions, as our initial dilemma cannot provide a decisive resolution. Let me add that I am attracted to a different inference to the best explanation argument, this one insisting that aesthetic realism makes for the more reasonable account of property possession by not creating one aberrant class of objects—works of art—that possess their properties more precariously than other things. But a good deal of metaphysical heavy-lifting would be needed to refine this suggestion.21 And nonrealists might be quite content to have artworks remain singularities in this regard. That is, for those who favor a parsimonious ontology, countenancing a class of physical entities that invites projection might seem less onerous than acknowledging supervenient, irreducible qualities. So this line of argument will also fail to convert skeptical nonrealists.

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s oLu Tion 3: borrowing from Ae sTheTiC empiriCism To reThink Ae sTheTiC QuALiTie s Perhaps we would do better to reexamine the terms in which our opening problem was couched. Was the understanding of aesthetic qualities there a proper one? One might worry that the recurring example I have chosen for discussion—the delicate/insipid dispute— does not adequately represent the great majority of aesthetic qualities and so encourages us to mistake the structure of aesthetic debate. Granted, some aesthetic qualities seem best understood as phenomenal qualities presented to one or another of our senses—“gaudy” (said of a color), “delicate” (said of a shape), “piercing” (said of a sound), “sad” (said of a posture), “powerful” (said of a movement). Presumably, no one would deny that we acknowledge such qualities. Philosophers of mind with different views about qualia would of course explain them differently—some would endorse qualia and go on to gloss them in physicalist or epiphenomenal terms, while others might have recourse to an error theory, denying the existence of anything corresponding to these so- called mental experiences. So long as the reported experiences are explained, accounted for in some way or other by each of the competing theories, the relevant aesthetic points can be made. But, this only covers a small portion of the aesthetic qualities about which ideal critics might disagree, for many such qualities are not affordances delivered to a single sense. Since theirs is not a simple phenomenology that might correspond to a single quale, however explained, they are not best understood on the model of secondary qualities. Even for a rather simple low-level claim, for instance, that a painting is garish or a musical theme strident, we can’t be sure that sensitive critics are picking up on a single garishness or stridency quale. Present- day philosophers debate about whether higher- order properties count among the contents of perception.22 At the very least, though appreciators might immediately acknowledge, say, the garishness of a painting, justifying that attribution would be considerably more labor-intensive, requiring reference to an assortment of lower-level properties. It could involve discerning the component colors, registering their saturation, intensity and so on, noting their interactions, making some sort of implicit comparison with other available color ranges and combinations. And “garish” seems an aesthetic term that finds its primary home in talk of color. Consider how the complexity is increased if we turn to examples of aesthetic terms that

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apply metaphorically—amusing melodies, lyrical facades, perfunctory painted passages. Plus in our discussion of aesthetic qualities in chapter 2, we noted Noël Carroll’s plea that theorists acknowledge the much more complex examples that must be admitted to the fold. (Recall “The poem expresses late nineteenth- century fin-de-siecle, bohemian anarchistic despair and loathing.” See chap. 2, p. 36.) There may be a more helpful way to negotiate this challenge than entirely rethinking our earlier characterization of aesthetic qualities. We might reconsider the circumstances in which aesthetic qualities, no matter how complex, are properly ascribed to works of art. We can take up this topic by examining discussion of a view called aesthetic empiricism. For this task, I will follow the lead of Peter Lamarque, who devotes a chapter of his book Work and Object to this theory. Aesthetic empiricism—henceforth AE for short—is the view that our knowledge of aesthetic properties comes to us through our senses. Lamarque credits the expression to Gregory Currie, quoting this claim from An Ontology of Art: “What is aesthetically valuable in a painting can be detected merely by looking at it. Features that cannot be so detected are not properly aesthetic ones.”23 This first approximation of AE must be refined to accommodate the literary arts, since we don’t appreciate them primarily through our senses. Instead, our sensory interactions with written or spoken words generate prescribed trains of imagining. Currie handles this problem by enlarging the category of sensory perception to include verbal understanding. Once properly buttressed and expanded, AE seems committed to this main tenet: there can be no difference in ascribed properties unless it is accompanied by a difference in perception. While it seems right to characterize our initial access to works of art as perceptual in some strong sense, the view so formulated has two problematic consequences. If delicacy of imagination ensures that ideal critics will agree about the perceptual properties of the works they judge, they ought never to differ in the assignment of aesthetic qualities to those works. Thus the view rules out the indiscernible examples proposed by Danto and others. It also seems unable to accommodate blameless differences of the sort Hume posits. The challenge then is that AE seems to mishandle two sorts of cases: those where one critic judges perceptually indiscernible works and those where two equally well- credentialed critics judge a given work differently. Currie rejects AE for the first of these reasons. Lamarque, too, rejects a bold-faced version of the view. But he proposes some amend-

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ments that illuminate the Humean dilemma we are examining; his discussion is relevant to our pursuit. Recall that the various Red Square paintings described by Danto—“The Israelites Crossing the Red Sea,” “Kierkegaard’s Mood,” “Red Square” (a Moscow landscape), a second “Red Square” (a minimalist composition), “Nirvana,” and “Red Table Cloth”—were different works.24 As such they had different aesthetic qualities, different meanings, and in all likelihood different worths. Yet each would seem to deliver the same unvariegated red surface to perception and thus be on a par for AE. The inability to distinguish these works seems a clear failing of the theory. How are we to handle this challenge to AE? Lamarque’s proposed fix is to insist that critical judgment applies only to properly situated works. Considered as uncategorized objects, Danto’s multiple red squares are indeed indiscernible. But Lamarque believes perceptual and aesthetic differences come into play once the objects are identified as distinct works.25 And those disparate work identities emerge when certain non-perceptual properties are taken into account. In particular, Lamarque proposes that “relational properties, including those bearing on the work’s origin, its cultural and historical context, are as essential to its identity as are its intrinsic or structural properties” (128).26 Overall then, Lamarque divides AE into two claims, one positive (that the aesthetic value of a work emerges through immediate perceptual or experiential encounter) and one negative (that factors related to history, context, or provenance are not relevant to such encounters) (126)—and urges us to maintain only the first. Lamarque’s move allows him to handle indiscernible cases, as his amendments provide the conceptual resources to differentiate between indistinguishable objects and distinct and different works. However, Lamarque adds one key assumption to his view. He believes that in these cases the indistinguishable objects, once considered as works, will be experienced/perceived differently, inviting ascription of different perceptual and/or aesthetic properties. Certainly the red square narrating the Jews’ traversal of the Red Sea is triumphant, while that presenting Matisse’s tablecloth is idyllic, perhaps even decadent. But Lamarque seems to think that critics ascribing such disparate aesthetic properties must do so because they are having qualitatively different perceptual experiences of the formerly indistinguishable objects: “Differences in aesthetic value must show themselves in differences of experience” (135). Thus Lamarque’s emendation of AE brings us right back to the verificationist impasse with

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which we have been struggling throughout this chapter. If we partition aesthetic experience to include basic (underlying) sensory or perceptual qualities in contrast to supervening aesthetic qualities, there seems no way to tell whether, or at what “level,” the critics’ sensory perceptions of the two canvases differ. Note that my discussion of Lamarque’s emendation of AE has addressed only the one critic/two indistinguishable works problem. Any solution that seems satisfactory here leaves the workings of Humean blameless differences untouched. And a familiar question recurs here. Do the two critics, say an ascerbic one and a sanguine one, have matching sensory experiences of the work about which they disagree, or do they perceive it differently and therefore ascribe competing aesthetic qualities and perhaps deliver competing summary evaluations? Since the impasse repeatedly blocking our progress is a thorny problem in the philosophy of mind—the nature of appreciative experience—we might try a new approach and ask whether the findings of cognitive science can illuminate critics’ differing responses. In the following section we will abandon armchair theorizing and consider the experimental results accumulated by generations of psychological researchers. Retaining a focus on aesthetic qualities, we will try to see how ascriptions of such qualities are understood. Of particular interest is determining whether such qualities come valenced, as Goldman presumed, or whether research instead identifies correlates of the neutral descriptive content that Levinson posited.

s oLu Tion 4: Looking To empiriCAL re seArCh There are two different lines of psychological research that seem to address our questions. The first seeks the determinants of aesthetic preference. The second explores its nature and its physical realization. Philosophers have been proposing theories of beauty since ancient times. But in the modern era, scientists began investigating the psychological and neural underpinnings of aesthetic experience. Many trace this back to the 1876 publication of Vorschule der Aesthetik by Gustav Fechner, the founder of psychophysics. When twentieth-century investigators designed empirical research to support and extend the principles of gestalt psychology, preference studies were included in this mix. Competing theorists offered a range of disparate formulas to explain our aesthetic choices. Determining factors were said to include complexity and originality (Birkhoff ), simplicity (Eysenck), arousal potential (Berlyne), prototypicality (Martindale),

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peak-shift (Ramachandran), attentional effort (Birkhoff ), and placement and orientation (Palmer). Meaningfulness, high intensive salience, context, and familiarity also enter into the discussion. This quick summary raises several questions. First, are the experimenters addressing the topic of our current inquiry—appreciators’ response to aesthetic qualities? A 1990 paper by Colin Martindale offering an overview of earlier research cites studies investigating preferences for an incredibly disparate set of items. The list includes random polygons from three to forty sides (Munsinger and Kessen, 1964), loudness of pure tones (Vitz 1971), concentration of salt and sour substances (Engel 1928), furniture (Whitfield and Slatter, 1979), faces (Light, Hollander, and Kayra-Stuart, 1981), houses (Purcell, 1984), colors (Martindale and Moore, 1988), and exemplars of semantic categories (Martindale, Moore, and West, 1988).27 These studies seem focused on objects too ordinary (furniture), too abstract (polygons), or too enmeshed in sexual and cultural systems (faces) to specifically tease out subjects’ responses to aesthetic qualities as understood here. The situation isn’t much improved when the experiments focus on works of art rather than everyday objects or artificial prompts. Here subjects are often asked to rate each work on a numerical scale after a very brief viewing or to make a “forced choice” between pairs of proffered works. When test subjects without much background in the arts are asked to perform these tasks, the situation is very far from that in which a real-world critic would assess a work and arrive at an all-things-considered judgment. For example, it seems unlikely that the presented works would be appropriately categorized before the summary rating was delivered. Yet correct categorization directly affects the assignment of aesthetic qualities—that is the main point of Kendall Walton’s groundbreaking 1970 paper “Categories of Art,” discussed earlier in chapter 2. The various experiments mentioned above not only suggest that aesthetic preference is promiscuous; they also invite some methodological worries. Many of the investigators who explore preference use factor analysis to tease out the aspects of the stimulus most responsible for the subjects’ responses. But factor analysis can at best point to correlations; theorists may doubt whether it identifies true causes.28 At the very least, it does not provide us with reasons that the subjects would confirm, or volunteer if queried. And this points to a more troubling worry for preference research. Facts and features of which we are wholly unaware seem capable of determining our likes and dislikes. A skeptical strain in both philosophy and psychology has theorists calling into question not only what we like

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and why we claim to like it but also whether we even know that we like it. On the psychological side, consider Nisbett and Wilson’s challenge to the reliability of introspective reports about the grounds of our preferences, Zajonc’s and Cutting’s documentation of exposure effects, Kahneman’s presentation of the biases inherent in the operation of our System 1 or “fast” mode of thinking.29 When asked why they had the preferences they did, subjects as often constructed phantasms as retrieved actual triggers. From philosophy, consider Matthew Kieran’s writings on snobbery in art. Kieran distinguishes virtuous appreciation, which is responsive to an object’s aesthetic qualities, from appreciative vices that inappropriately ground judgment in irrelevant social features. He cautions that “the identification and appraisal of aesthetic qualities can be cued in ways of which we are not conscious, and it is easy to conflate pleasure gained from aesthetic appreciation with the pleasures of recognition and status.”30 Kevin Melchionne takes the skeptical line even farther in his paper “On the Old Saw: I Know Nothing about Art but I Know What I Like.” He claims that we don’t even know what we like.31 Melchionne closes with the ringing disclaimer that “our accounts of the sources of our pleasure often amount to mental gerrymandering, educated guesses, and aspirational consumerism” (139).32 One last consideration further complicates research into aesthetic preference. Just what are experimental subjects asked to evaluate? As noted above, many early studies explored responses to relatively “impoverished” stimuli—individual colors, color combinations, variously oriented line segments, rounded versus angular polygons—rather than to fullblown works of art. But attempts to remedy this problem still fall short if investigators probe aesthetic preference by asking about beauty. For a start, many worthy works of art simply aren’t beautiful at all. And appreciation involves more than noting beauty, should it be present. Rather, appreciation requires understanding.33 Last but not least, the challenges ramify when theorists move beyond the visual arts and seek to explain the appreciation of narrative arts and of arts that unfold over time. Consider designing studies to track appreciation as readers traverse a 500-page novel, theater-goers attend a two-hour performance, jazz aficionados savor an extended riff. The discussion to date should call into question empirical work that attempts to plumb our aesthetic preferences by querying experimental subjects and running factor analysis to sort out the results. But another strand of research sidesteps this criticism and instead looks within to probe the

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nature and structure of aesthetic response. Investigators pursue this goal in two ways: by increasingly complicating their theories to provide a fuller, more psychologically real account of aesthetic appreciation, and by employing new scanning technologies to access its neural underpinnings. Mapping the neural systems activated in aesthetic experience promises to reveal not what we like, nor why we like it, but rather the very nature of liking itself. In particular, localization studies promise to tell us whether aesthetic appreciation is primarily a ‘hot’ response, one tied to the emotion centers of the brain, or a cooler, more analytic cognitive affair. It is this line of research, I suggest, that offers us the most promise of answering our riddle about the warring ideal critics engaged in the delicate/insipid duel. Examples of the first approach—improved theorizing—include Helmut Leder’s information processing account (2004), Rolf Reber’s processing fluency proposal (2004), Anjan Chatterjee’s view incorporating David Marr’s three levels of visual processing (2003), Arthur Shimamura’s I-SKE model (2012), Nicholas Bullot’s and Reber’s psycho-historical amalgam (2013), and finally, Chatterjee’s and Oshin Vartanian’s more recently published overview (2016) which takes aesthetic experience to be an emergent property of the interaction of three systems: emotion-valuation, sensorymotor, and meaning-knowledge.34 Each of these competing theories offers an appropriately complicated model of aesthetic experience as each posits component processes or stages that together comprise aesthetic response. For instance, Leder describes five stages, linked by feedback loops, that provide perceptual, cognitive, and affective analysis and reaction; many of the factors singled out by earlier researchers—for example, complexity, familiarity, style, conventions, prototypes, interpretation, and more, figure in the elaborate flow chart he provides to illustrate his view. Chatterjee posits components corresponding to early, intermediate, and late vision, where the first two stages, automatic and universal, deliver information about form, while the third stage recruits knowledge and memory to construct suppositions about content. Bullot and Reber’s approach merges familiar psychological measures with contextual and historical data about works of art. They propose that works carry causal information about their origins—that is, about artistic intention, art-historical context, and artworld conventions—in much the way that tree rings carry causal information about the climate patterns that sustained their growth. The acronym titling Shimamura’s theory embraces a similarly broad range of factors—the artistic intentions that generated the works as well as appreciators’ sensory, knowledge-based, and emotional responses to them.

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These same categories recur in the tripartite structure of Chatterjee and Vartanian’s view which acknowledges emotional, sensory, and theoretic contributions to aesthetic experience. Thus all these theories make room for both bottom-up and top-down processing, building on and improving the insights of Fechner’s ground-breaking psychophysical proposal. Can imaging experiments capture the complexities of such theories? Consider first some early work. In a pair of 2004 papers, Vartanian and Vinod Goel report on studies they ran to confirm their hypothesis that aesthetic preference is mediated by emotion. fMRI scans were conducted as participants rated paintings—both representational and abstract— on a 0–4 point scale. The authors concluded that “in participants with no training in the visual arts, rating paintings based on subjective aesthetic preference activates structures that mediate emotion or reward.”35 Their research details very different areas in the brain that are activated when preference increases and when it decreases.36 However, some of the theories cited above differ on just when and how the affective component enters into an aesthetic assessment, with competing answers built into the “boxology” charting the structure of each theory.37 Turn next to the effects of knowledge. Chatterjee and Vartanian (2016) cite a number of experiments that compare responses when subjects are differently primed about the objects they’re asked to judge. For example, when told that objects are either from a museum or computer generated, or from a museum or an adult education center, or authentic or fake, subjects displayed different activation patterns and different preferences (177). Note how this echoes some of the well-known experiments discussed in chapter 1 when wine experts were tricked with dyed wine and with wine decanted into different and differently signifying bottles. Unfortunately, the delivery of knowledge via top- down processing is not easily charted. Chatterjee and Vartanian grant that “there is growing evidence that top-down processes in the form of meaning and knowledge exert strong influences on aesthetic experience . . . our experience of art is influenced by factors beyond its perceptual qualities and involves the context within which it is processed” (C&V, p. 177). In seconding the importance of contextual factors, these researchers lend support to some of the philosophical views we have already canvassed.38 But Chatterjee has repeatedly characterized this aspect of aesthetic response as “widely distributed” once top-down streams and feedback/appraisal loops are taken into account.39 This makes it unlikely that localization studies can helpfully pinpoint these inputs. In addition, “the representations of meaning

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and knowledge likely vary greatly across individuals, cultures, and historic epochs, which in turn would introduce more variability in the neural representation of those factors” (C&V, p. 178). Chatterjee and Vartanian also acknowledge the appraisal theory of emotions “according to which subjective goals and desires influence emotional reactions to objects and events in the world,” and they go on to state “this can also help explain why the same works of art can evoke radically different responses in viewers in terms of the top- down appraisals that are applied to initial judgments” (180). Note that Hume’s characterization of ideal critics takes into account many of these top- down factors that generate variability in aesthetic judgment. Knowledge claims and meaning ascriptions are accumulated through Humean practice and comparison; variation across times and cultures is charted by the test of time; and finally, individual variation is predicted and excused by the provision of blameless differences. Though this tidy summary is complicated by the fact that ideal critics build their cognitive stock and re adjust their preferences as each follows his or her distinct developmental path.40 Once we acknowledge the distributed nature of the top- down contributions to any aesthetic judgment—those providing framing art-historical and contextual knowledge as well those injecting more idiosyncratic personal associations—we can attempt to assess how accurately all this can be tracked by current imaging technology. Experimenters can certainly gain insight into appreciative situations, determining what perceptual systems have been activated, what other regions of the brain are involved, response times for various subjects and varying tasks, as well as whether reactions are “hot” or “cold”—that is, whether the emotional or reward centers of the brain light up. But it seems quite unlikely that that the effects of contextual and/or art-historical knowledge can be precisely mapped. Shimamura appropriately notes that the use of modern-day scanning technologies does not constitute a “form of neural phrenology.”41 Given these concessions, I doubt that present- day neuroscience can get us beyond the verificationist impasse set out above and resolve the debate about aesthetic realism. Suppose we took on this challenge: design a decisive experiment to reveal the neural architecture underlying critical disagreement. Recall how Goldman and Levinson presented their alternatives. On Goldman’s view, the positive or negative emotions associated with a given work stem from valence inextricably associated with its component aesthetic qualities, while for Levinson, those positive or negative emotions represent a response to a distinct higher-level impression.

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Let us roll our two critics, Delicate and Insipid, into adjoining fMRI tubes and present them with a contested work. We have allowed that every critic builds his or her cognitive stock in a unique manner. So Delicate and Insipid each place the work in question in a comparison class built up through their own personal history of practice and comparison— a unique set of previous aesthetic encounters, leavened by distinct temperamental and broad cultural factors. All this frames their subsequent ascriptions of delicacy and insipidity to the work under consideration. Certainly the concepts in play cannot be read off from a brain scan. This is in part what our authors were indicating when they characterized knowledge and meaning as widely distributed. More important, what it would seem imaging experiments cannot do, at least at present, is flag precisely when and where the attribution of an aesthetic quality occurs. Since aesthetic qualities like delicacy and insipidity can be realized in so many different ways, since they can be featured across the arts, and since the ability to recognize them does not seem the sort of trait an evolutionary account would trumpet as advantageous or adaptive, it seems highly unlikely that we have stable dedicated delicacy detectors, insipidity detectors, gaudiness detectors, and so on, along the lines of the edge detectors and oscillation detectors that have been found in pioneering cat and frog studies.42 Nor can experiments determine just when and where specific background, contextual, or associative information— essential to framing our ascription of aesthetic qualities—is injected into a given appreciative experience. Return to our two warring critics. In examining the contested work of art, Delicate and Insipid perceive the same supervenience base. We don’t yet know whether they first perceive and process base properties and only then acknowledge the supervening property. This is certainly not what it “feels” like when we consider our own aesthetic pronouncements, but we have learned not to trust introspective reports of such matters. Moreover, we have just agreed that aesthetic qualities like delicacy and insipidity can be realized in many different ways. Our decisive experiment seeks to determine whether positive and negative valence are tied to the aesthetic qualities Delicate and Insipid discern. In effect, we are asking which stage of processing is hot, whether valence arrives along with or subsequent to the acknowledgement of the quality in question. The term “subsequent” here invites us to think of reaction time differences as crucial. But differences between which reactions? Finding that Delicate and Insipid reacted at different rates wouldn’t be decisive; it would be utterly unsurprising to

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find that different individuals conducted their appreciative work at different rates. Moreover, Chatterjee and Vartanian suggest that we would instead need to track intracritical differences by setting up an experimental situation in which, say, Delicate, opined about various delicate items as well as items possessing some aesthetic quality that left Delicate utterly unmoved. That is, we would want to contrast ‘hot’ and ‘cool’ assessments by one and the same critic. Or perhaps hot (favorable) assessments of supervening and non-supervening properties. To set up the former comparisons, we might need to find emotionally scarred, or perhaps serendipitously lesioned, critics43; to recognize the latter, we’d have to solve the problem that left us stalled earlier on regarding the neural processing of supervening properties. I predict that neither approach will be occupying experimental psychologists any time soon. While we have found much to criticize in this quick traversal of cognitive science, there is one important takeaway that is relevant to our attempt to put forward a neo-Humean account of proper appreciation—an interest in expertise. Many of the experimenters mentioned above have found differences between the responses of naïve subjects and those with more background in the arts. This is certainly predictable. But it has encouraged a re-orientation toward the scientific study of expertise. Vartanian and Goel close their 2004 paper “Emotion Pathways in the Brain Mediate Aesthetic Preference” with the suggestion that quite different results might hold for subjects with expertise in the arts and call for additional research to “dissociate the neural correlates of aesthetic preference versus aesthetic judgment as a function of expertise in the visual arts” (42). We should of course expand this exhortation beyond the visual arts. Only twelve years later, Chatterjee and Vartanian proclaim that “one of the most reliable findings to emerge from empirical aesthetics is that expertise and formal training in the arts influence aesthetic experience” (181). They conclude their paper in similar fashion with a list of questions to guide future research including: “How does expertise in the visual arts alter the neural structures and functional responses to aesthetic objects?” (189). Thus present-day researchers investigating aesthetic experience urge a change in focus that complements our attempt to put in place a neo-Humean view.

s oLu Tion 5: imp o sing A suiTAbiLiT y reQuiremen T The broad brief Chatterjee and Vartanian offer in support of the study of expertise is heartening. But their examples of expertise in action (e.g., a

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preference for abstract over representational painting) and their suggestions of its neural correlates (e.g., greater levels of attention/effort and higher order processing, greater neural efficiency) are underwhelming to say the least. Accordingly, let us ascend from the neural and/or subpersonal levels and continue our common-sense exploration of experts and their interactions. At issue in this chapter is the likelihood of critical disagreement and its consequences for realism in aesthetics. In this closing section, I would like to advocate a restriction on critical performance. I believe we should put in place a Suitability Requirement that builds on Hume’s notion of blameless differences and demands that critics only hold forth about works for which they are temperamentally and culturally suited. One might object that good critics should be able to overcome obstacles and correctly and sympathetically judge works they don’t personally like. But since art is meant to kindle our interest and enthusiasm, or at the very least provide some sort of satisfaction, such forced judgments might not meet the threshold for ideal appreciation. Consider the following analogy. In the legal realm, judges are supposed to recuse themselves if their interests or allegiances threaten their objectivity; the aesthetic case is just the reverse— critics should recuse themselves if they lack the engagement that would ground an enthusiastic response.44 The qualification that emerges in the aesthetic case should be formulated at the level of types rather than tokens, since not all works of art succeed. We need to leave open the possibility that critics will find flaws in almost all of the works they encounter. Thus the Suitability Requirement should read as follows: critics should only hold forth about works that are of a type capable of arousing their interest.45 Admittedly, new worries flow from this proposal. First, can we assume that ideal critics know themselves well enough to select the works they’re most suited to judge? The criteria that identify ideal critics don’t rule out self- deception in this regard. Moreover, if attack mode has its pleasures, some critics might prefer to flout the principle just stated and tear into works they’re constitutionally likely to find wanting. Second, we must find ways to accommodate the fact (discussed above) that the judgment even of ideal critics changes and matures. Presumably suitability relations follow suit. And finally, we must decide just how to demarcate suitability. Within each critic’s home artworld, how far does suitability extend? Where and when does it grade off? Since no critic will amass the experience, let alone have the predilection, to assess all art, critics will of necessity spe-

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cialize. The critical division of labor will vary depending on how suitability is parsed, on how fine-grained we understand it to be. It seems unlikely that a critic is well suited to judge Pride and Prejudice but not Sense and Sensibility, to judge the Bilbao Guggenheim but not the Disney Concert Hall, to judge Les Demoiselles d’Avignon but not Guernica. But is a critic who is well positioned to judge Pride and Prejudice likely to do equally well with Middlemarch? With works by Edith Wharton? Barbara Pym? Would novels by Pat Barker lie beyond the scope of this critic? Would Hemingway be out of the question? What about William Faulkner? At issue here is whether expertise is fine-grained.46 The details of such decisions are intriguing. They turn in part on how we assess work similarity, as well as on how we understand the different complex interactions of suitability and blameless difference. It is certainly not the case that works are best evaluated by those critics who like them best. For a start, not all works will be praised, even if we come up with suitable matchmaking principles. Some critics might be especially well positioned to note the shortcomings of a given work.47 Still, in sum, if we agree with Levinson that there are no a priori restrictions on the extent of individual expertise, then we should allow that any critic who fulfills Hume’s requirements— one who has perceptual acuity relevant to the art in question, a backlog of experience (practice and comparison) with the artist, style, school, genre, under consideration, good sense and freedom from prejudice—and who meets the Suitability Requirement for the work(s) being judged can appropriately hold forth and ought to command our attention. And while it might be surprising that one critic would be so positioned for both Pride and Prejudice and The Sound and the Fury, and even more surprising that one critic might be so for both eighteenth-century British literature and fifteenth- century Florentine architecture, we can’t peremptorily rule this out. After characterizing so-called Humean Ideal Critics (chapter 3) and arguing that they are in fact real (actual) rather than ideal (chapter 4), we have here taken up the topic of critical disagreement. While we cannot guarantee that critics will issue unanimous verdicts in all instances and about all works, we have emerged with some machinery—the Scope Restriction, the Millian Requirement, the Suitability Requirement.—that places limits on the circumstances in which Humean critics can hold forth and on the judgments they can offer. Hopefully, taken together these advance our understanding of proper critical practice. Consider how things stand at the end of the day. A variety of consequences flow from the traits of ideal critics (set out in our revised neo-

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Humean account) and the nature of aesthetic appreciation, supplemented by the machinery just mentioned. We know that their delicacy of taste will cause Humean ideal critics to agree about the non-aesthetic properties of works of art. And the Scope Restriction noted in section 5 above will limit the range of aesthetic properties about which the critics might disagree. While no accumulation of examples can secure the case for aesthetic realism, Levinson reminds us that ideal critics will often agree in ascribing aesthetic qualities. He closes his article “Aesthetic Properties, Evaluative Force, and Differences of Sensibility” with a long list of examples to establish that among “competent critics,” irresolvable disagreement about the attribution of thick aesthetic qualities is the exception rather than the rule.48 Critical claims must also be matched to their intended targets. Critics should only hold forth about works to which they are suited—works of a type capable of interesting them. Critics who are assessing different parts of a work, or different aspects of the same part, might appear to disagree when in fact they are simply talking by one another. When it comes to meaning, realism does not require unanimity among ideal critics. Since interpretation is underdetermined by the array of aesthetic qualities in place, much as scientific theories are underdetermined by the empirical features of the real world, many works are multiply interpretable.49 But critics must marshal compelling justifications for whatever interpretations they endorse. Finally, our understanding of the test of time requires that suitable critics agree regarding the acknowledged masterpieces of their art tradition and perhaps also those of neighboring artworlds. The results so far might provide some encouragement for proponents of realism in aesthetics. Imagining the set of all possible aesthetic disagreements, a great many could be set aside before tallying up the balance sheet. Those where one or more disputants fail to meet the criteria for being a Humean ideal critic (or fail it for the work or type of work in question, ie, lack the proper contextualizing experience50) could go as could those with participants who are temperamentally or culturally unsuited to judge the work in question—the Suitability Requirement at work. Still, the resulting account falls short of realism in this respect: the understanding of critical expertise put in place does not warrant the expectation of universal agreement when critics judge works of art. Whether they are ascribing aesthetic qualities, offering explication or interpretation, or voicing a summary judgment, critics’ views will be shaped by their experience, temperament, and culture. And so two critics might have perceptually indistin-

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guishable experiences of a work but ascribe different aesthetic qualities, offer different interpretations, assign different summary evaluations.51 Happily, this is far from anything goes. When critics weigh works to which they are suited, under appropriate circumstances for judgment, we are guaranteed that a justificatory structure is in place; we are receiving reasoned assessments and evaluations. More important, verdicts from critics whose taste we share can be expected to hold for us as well. The urgency then shifts to the problem of finding such critics and deciding whether to align our taste with theirs. I will turn to these issues in the following chapter, where I change my focus from critical disagreement to the phenomenon of shared taste.

6 ·Comparing and Sharing Taste

I begin by suggesting that we assemble what I call Critic Clusters, groupings of critics whose preference sets (assessments of various works of art) overlap. This in effect imposes a metric on critical judgment; the density of the clusters indicates the comparative value of works as well as the tendentiousness of competing interpretations. I argue that the formation of such groupings is possible in principle, and that the outcome is a mitigated aesthetic realism. Critic Clusters allow us not only to compare and contrast the judgments of competing critics, but also to determine how far from that standard our own aesthetic judgments fall. If we agree to recognize critical expertise— that is, to elevate neo-Humean critics of the sort outlined in the previous chapters, then important questions remain about the workings of critical advice. In addition to charting how critics’ opinions relate to those of their predecessors (the test of time) and their contemporaries (the suitability requirement), we must also examine how they relate to the amateurs they advise. I organize this chapter around two important challenges regarding critical advice posed by Jerrold Levinson. The first concerns Training Up—why abandon the works we like for more difficult works that critics recommend? The second raises issues of Authenticity—don’t we lose something of ourselves, and become more like everyone else, if we allow critics to shape our taste? Levinson is insistent that critics’ advice can lead novices to more rewarding aesthetic experiences. I believe this claim must be doubly leavened, including not only the qualification Levinson proposes regarding equivalence classes of worthy works, but also the suitability effects I argued for earlier (which carry forward Hume’s notion of blameless differences). I examine in some detail the structure of shared taste, exploring the asymmetries underlying Alan Gold-

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man’s advice that we each find critics whose taste we share. Issues about the trajectory of taste come into play here. I suggest that the notions of juvenilia and maturity apply to critics and the amateurs they advise as well as to artists’ oeuvres. Overall, an adequate notion of partial and imperfect appreciation must be secured for novice appreciators, with the metric I have outlined indicating the direction and degree to which their taste can and should improve.

A ssembLing CriTiC CLu sTer s In the previous chapter, I explored the circumstances under which Humean ideal critics might disagree about the works they were judging. In this chapter, I turn to the possibilities for agreement and explore some dimensions of like-mindedness. My interest here includes agreement between and among critics, between critics and the novices they advise, and between and among appreciators who choose to rely on the expertise of others. I start by considering cases in which the verdicts of ideal critics overlap. I propose a measure we can use in such circumstances, one allowing us to assess the degree of unanimity that still holds in the art world. The mechanism I propose is the identification of critic clusters. Critic clusters are assemblages of critics who deliver similar verdicts. They “share the same taste” in the sense that we have been examining. Should every Humean ideal critic constitute a cluster of one, the result would be rampant aesthetic relativism. But should there be a way to effectively group critics according to shared taste, this radical result could be avoided. My hope, then, is that attention to the structure of aesthetic appreciation will support a qualified form of aesthetic realism. Although I have been emphasizing aesthetic qualities throughout this book—tracking a dispute between our two imaginary critics, Delicate and Insipid—loyalty to specific aesthetic qualities does not generally drive aesthetic disagreement.1 Qualities are critiqued more locally, when they do not suit the work in which they are found or help advance a flawed work, and references to aesthetic qualities play a justificatory role when critics defend their views. Critics instead exhibit differences in taste by demonstrating preferences for and against particular genres and subjects, schools and artists. The concept of critic clusters addresses these critical judgments and presupposes that we can place a metric on ideal critics, or more precisely, on their aesthetic judgments. Suitability acts as gatekeeper here; only those critic/work pairings that meet the suitability requirement can

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figure in critic clusters. To construct these, we need to flesh out the intuitive notion of a given critic’s preferences being closer to those of some one critic than to those of another. I believe we make such comparisons often in everyday life. A critic who is fond of Renoir is closer in taste to a critic who is fond of Watteau than to one who is fond of Piranesi; a critic who is fond of Mozart is closer in taste to a critic who is fond of Haydn than to one who is fond of Liszt. These claims are based on an intuitive sense of the overall similarity of works. They might be justified by appeal to Richard Wollheim’s notions of general and individual style;2 they also derive some support from the existence of computer programs that convincingly generate, say, an entirely new piano sonata in the style of Haydn. It does seem possible that ideal critics could have preferences for very disparate artists and works. Thus Critic A might resemble Critic B with regard to some of her preferences, but be more of a fellow traveler with Critic C with regard to others. If this is how taste functions in the real world, then we should allow individual critics to inhabit more than one critic cluster. As established in chapter 4, no actual critic will be in a position to hold forth on all works, or even on all works within a given art. Since ours is not an Ideal Observer theory, critics will inevitably specialize and their views will evolve and mature. The resulting division of labor among ideal critics allows the vast domain of art to be assessed. In addition to similarities based on preferences for particular artists, schools, genres, and so on, we should also chart similarities between critics’ assessments of individual works. That is, we need to find ways to claim that a critic’s interpretation or evaluation of a given work is closer to that of some one critic than to that of another. We already know of some results that will apply to cases of this sort. They flow from facts about the traits of ideal critics and the nature of aesthetic appreciation. Thus we know that their delicacy of taste will cause Humean ideal critics to agree about the non-aesthetic properties of works of art. And the Scope Restriction noted in the previous chapter will limit the range of aesthetic properties about which the critics might disagree. Since summary evaluations supervene on the set of aesthetic properties ascribed, a mapping of ideal critics’ judgments will be branching in form. They will agree about base properties, ascribe different aesthetic properties within a given latitude, offer varying interpretations, and then make different overall judgments tied to these earlier findings. We could in principle then construct Preference Sets for each critic, specifying the properties he or she ascribes to each work of art.

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Our metric on ideal critics can then be adjusted to indicate the degree of overlap in their Preference Sets. I am of course offering nothing but a promissary note here, and naysayers might well complain that I am envisioning an impenetrably complex scheme. In reply, let me offer some considerations suggesting that this approach is both theoretically and actually possible. To underscore its theoretical possibility, consider similarly structured schemes in other realms. Modal logicians who place metrics on the set of all possible worlds are surely matching or exceeding the complexity of my proposal. Take the section devoted to closeness in David Lewis’s book On the Plurality of Worlds.3 Lewis explicitly discusses the case of worlds that start off like the actual world, then diverge. Causal laws are shared between the two worlds up to that point. This very much resembles the structure of the preference sets of ideal critics who agree about non-aesthetic properties but diverge regarding the aesthetic properties that supervene upon them, or those of ideal critics who agree about both non-aesthetic and aesthetic properties, but diverge regarding the interpretations that these support. That is, worlds that share a history up to a point, then diverge, have the same branching structure as critical assessments that agree on base properties and perhaps on some aesthetic properties but differ when it comes to interpretation or evaluation. As for actual examples of such similarity spaces, we are bombarded by these on a daily basis. All returning Amazon.com consumers are regularly greeted by opening screens suggesting books they might like, based on their record of past purchases. Netflix customers receive similar treatment. Netflix offered a $1,000,000 reward to anyone who could significantly improve the algorithm used to create these preference-based suggestions. Pandora is a service that provides subscribers with more music of the sorts they like. For less commercial uses of such similarity spaces, consider computer programs that generate “new” musical works in the style of eminent composers—Mozart, Haydn, etc. Douglas Hofstadter has written and lectured about computer scientist David Cope’s EMI program (Experiments in Musical Intelligence). Hofstadter reports that he fooled the majority of his audience at the Eastman School of Music when offering up a pair of mazurkas, one by Chopin, the other by EMI. I believe Hofstadter was wrong about the gloomy conclusions he drew from this incident.4 Nonetheless, the example testifies to the successful practical employment of some of the intuitions underlying the notion of critic clusters. While I have proposed a metric that would help us determine when

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ideal critics have the same or similar taste, I don’t expect anyone to produce an actual elaboration of this scheme. But perhaps I have offered some helpful ideas on how to configure the terrain. The bare fact that such a metric is possible in principle may offer further support for qualified aesthetic realism. I closed the previous chapter with a discussion of considerations that weigh in favor of such a view—at the very least, a rejection of rampant relativism. Appeal to critic clusters allows a more vivid reckoning of this case. For example, critics who offer different summary evaluations/interpretations of a piece but attribute similar sets of non-aesthetic (perceptual, formal, structural) and aesthetic qualities are clearly disagreeing about one and the same work; their diverging accounts needn’t tempt us to multiply entities. Their views cluster. Extending this point, when critics disagree about the aesthetic qualities of a work, but assign qualities with the same valence—insipid versus anemic, bold versus brash—we might retain realism by individuating aesthetic qualities more coarsely. When multiple clusters form for a given work, it needn’t follow that one group of critics is right, the others wrong. That is, property possession is not a matter of majority rule. Nor is it the case that for contentious works, aesthetic properties are not real or are not truly possessed. Rather, the supervenience base that supports property ascription includes facts about appropriately situated critics and the circumstances of judgment as well as about perceptual, structural, and historical properties. Each cluster groups suitably situated critics, and relative to that framework, their claims are true. Here is where I depart from a strict realist view.5 Compare this outcome with the way in which reports of secondary qualities can seem to vary. We deem such qualities response- dependent, indicating that they announce themselves only to perceivers like us. But a normative weight is built into this notion. For example, those who experience the full range of visible colors are considered “normal perceivers,” while those for whom parts of the visible spectrum register differently or not at all are dismissed as impaired/color blind. I am advocating a different treatment of situations where suitably placed ideal critics ascribe different aesthetic qualities to a work. When competing clusters form, both critics can be right. But, facts about their temperaments and past critical experience become part of the supervenience base on which quality ascription rests. So too do facts about the circumstances in which the work is experienced. Note how attenuated this outcome becomes by the time various qualifying hypotheses are put into place. While allowances are made for temperamental and perceptual differences, critical disagreement cannot outpace

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the bounds mandated by the Scope Restriction, nor can critics disparage works of types incapable of interesting them. In a recent paper, Berit Brogaard proposes a semantics for aesthetic value terms (she distinguishes these from taste terms) that accords with the structures I have envisioned.6 She argues that such a semantics must be relativized to real critics, not to ideal critics, nor to the ideal counterparts of actual appreciators. In one part of her exposition, Brogaard states that aesthetic value properties— especially thick aesthetic properties—have a truth value only relative to an n-tuple including the world, a qualified art critic, the time, and optimal circumstances of evaluation (132). Relative to my account, much would be packed into the notion of a qualified critic; but Brogaard acknowledges from the get-go that applying aesthetic value terms requires both competence and experience (123). My entire project could be seen as an attempt to further flesh out these notions. It is precisely because works of art possess their properties in a robust way, subject to disagreement, disputation, and proof, that there is a point to criticism. While I have not, in the end, defended a straightforward version of realism,7 I believe that the machinery I have put in place redirects our attention in useful ways. I have charted how critics’ opinions relate to those of their predecessors (the Test of Time), their contemporaries (the Suitability Requirement and the formation of Critic Clusters), and to their own record of past critical judgments (the Millian Requirement). By inviting us to contemplate these links between critics, the works they judge, and the peers with whom they battle, my machinery deepens our understanding of the critical enterprise and supports a mitigated aesthetic realism. But one additional connection merits our attention. The proposed metric can be extended beyond the realm of ideal critics to embrace everyday appreciators. That is, Critic Clusters allow us not only to compare and contrast the judgments of competing critics, but also to consider how far from that standard our own aesthetic judgments fall. An enlarged map that situates all of us in the appreciative terrain can illuminate the workings of truly practical criticism— criticism that provides its users, actual people in the real world, with efficacious advice regarding which works of art they ought to sample and what they ought to make of them. I am especially interested in the use of criticism to aid our understanding of works rather than simply help us rank them one against another. Accordingly, I now turn to a new set of comparisons. In the remainder of this chapter, I examine how critics’ opinions relate to those of the amateurs they advise as well as how the preferences of those ama-

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teurs overlap and change. I organize my discussion around two important challenges regarding critical advice posed by Jerrold Levinson in a pair of papers published eight years apart. The first challenge, voiced in “Hume’s Standard of Taste: The Real Problem,” concerns training up—why abandon the works we like for more difficult works that critics recommend?8 The second challenge, rolled out in “Artistic Worth and Personal Taste,” raises issues of authenticity— don’t we lose something of ourselves, and become more like everyone else, if we allow critics to shape our taste?9

how AmATeur s benefiT from CriTiCAL AdviCe Levinson’s first paper examines the efficacy of critical advice. He formulates the real Humean problem trumpeted in his title as follows: “Why are the works enjoyed and preferred by ideal critics characterized as Hume characterizes them ones that I should, all things being equal, aesthetically pursue?” and restates the challenge more prosaically a little farther on: “Why concern yourself with what someone else maintains is artistically better, rather than what works for you?” (229, 230) Levinson is insistent that critical advice can lead novices to more rewarding aesthetic experiences. Recall the metaphors he employs to characterize ideal critics’ ability to track value in art—he referred to them as barometers, litmus paper, truffle pigs. I believe Levinson’s claim must be doubly leavened, including not only the qualification he proposes (discussed below) regarding equivalence classes of worthy works, but also the suitability effects I argued for earlier which carry forward Hume’s notion of blameless differences. But let’s start with a more fundamental point. In what relation do amateurs stand to the critics seeking to advise them? Alan Goldman attempts to mute the relativism inherent in aesthetic preference by advising that we each find critics whose taste we share.10 Presumably these would be experts with whom we have some temperamental and cultural overlap. Or at least, experts who can lead us in directions that effectively expand on our current preferences.11 Consider the logic of Goldman’s counsel. The expectation generated by surface grammar—namely, that shared taste is a symmetric matter—is defeated in both directions. Inevitably, ideal critics, in light of their wider experience, like many worthy works with which we’re not acquainted. A similar asymmetry applies in the other direction, as we currently prize many works which those critics disdain, and from which they hope to wean us. Issues about the trajectory of taste also come into play here. I have suggested

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that the notions of juvenilia and maturity apply to critics and the amateurs they advise as well as to artists’ oeuvres. Since our taste is not fully formed, by hypothesis we now prefer various works that we might relinquish were we to become acquainted with worthier substitutes. Return now to Levinson’s central claim in “Hume’s Standard of Taste: The Real Problem.” He maintains that in any given moment, we would do better to exchange our preferred set of works for those the relevant critics recommend. His argument proceeds by way of the Test of Time which he uses to both validate the critics’ taste and to provide exemplars of clearly worthy works. Levinson schematizes his argument on pp. 233–34 of his paper. An abbreviated formalization, adapted to fit Goldman’s proposal, might look like this: 1. Masterworks can be identified by the breadth, width, and durability of their appeal.12 2. Ideal critics whose taste we share properly appreciate masterworks so defined. 3. Artistic value is best measured in terms of intrinsically-rewardingexperience-affording potential. 4. Ideal critics provide the best measure of the artistic value of works of art generally. 5. Suppose a consensus of ideal critics whose taste we share prefers X to Y. 6. These facts give those of us content in our preference for Y a reason to pursue X.13 In chapter 4 I examined some of the logical challenges besetting Levinson’s appeal to the Test of Time; the extension to value in general in line 4 above seems particularly problematic. Levinson needs to plug the gap between past masterpieces and present contenders. His elucidation of step 4 of his expanded argument summarizes the ideal critic’s credentials in this regard: “A critic who is able to comprehend and appreciate masterworks in a given medium to their fullest is thus in the best position to compare the experience and satisfaction afforded by a given work in that medium to the sort of experiences and satisfactions that masterworks in the medium, appropriately apprehended, can provide” (234). Though Levinson tries to shore up his argument by restricting attention to works in a given medium, the worry remains that new and revolutionary works in a given medium can offer experiences and satisfactions markedly different from those offered by their

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predecessors. But let us for now stick with cases where there is a consensus among ideal critics regarding the worth of recommended works. In fact, Levinson qualifies the conclusion set out above. While he claims that any appreciator in this situation should put herself in a better position to appreciate X, he notes that the assembled premises give that perceiver a reason, but perhaps “not a conclusive one,” to attempt to change her preference (234). Here is why I think Levinson hedges this point. At any given time there are some ways in which an appreciator’s class of preferred works can effectively be expanded, while other directions are nonstarters. In short, the Suitability Requirement needs to inform not only each critic’s portfolio, but also the advice dispensed to those encouraged to change their taste, those attempting to ‘train up.’ If a novice appreciator has no experience with a given artist, genre, subject, etc., then introductions must be appropriate and effective. As I have said before, why we like what we like seems a deep mystery.14 Anna Ribeiro tries to chart some of the influences in play here in her paper “Aesthetic Luck.” 15 She initially identifies four relevant factors— constitutive luck, luck in upbringing, sociogeographic luck, and circumstantial luck—but then collapses these into two categories—native (constitutive) and non-native (upbringing, sociogeographic, circumstantial) aesthetic luck (4). Native or constitutive luck concerns capabilities we are born with; non-native luck refers to the opportunities we encounter and the experiences that result. Ribeiro emphasizes that this second category comprises circumstances beyond our control (6). While I agree that these factors shape our distinctive aesthetic sensibilities, the process is not a fully deterministic one. There are no ironclad laws of taste appreciators follow, and no algorithms that neatly capture the acquisition of aesthetic preference. There is always room for surprising likes or dislikes to take hold. Appreciators often come to favor new works because they resemble others already in their personal pantheons. But we must also accommodate cases where a leap is made and a critic successfully introduces an appreciator to an entirely new and, from her point of view, sui generis artist or work. Sometimes such matchmaking takes hold immediately—for one reason or another, the new work captures the novice’s interest. But it is also possible that a work, or an artist, “grows on” her, gradually winning her grudging approval. Many a philosopher has proposed an analogy between our interactions with works of art and our interactions with people. In particular, aestheticians have compared our reasons for coming to favor new works and our reasons for coming to form new friendships. Ted Cohen makes this compar-

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ison a centerpiece of his paper “On Consistency in One’s Personal Aesthetics,” Guy Damman and Elisabeth Schellekens take up love and friendship as a main example (the other is gustatory taste) in their paper on aesthetic reasons, and Sheila Lintott offers an extended overview of this terrain in her contribution to an anthology on friendship.16 This analogy can certainly aid our understanding of how our set of favored works grows and evolves. Loyalties to some old friends are steadfast and unchanging, but it is also the case that some connections become muted, some friends are dropped. In making new friends, there is sometimes an immediate interest and attraction—a platonic equivalent of the coup de foudre that can trigger romantic love. Other times we gradually become aware of the depths of others and the ways they answer our interests and needs. And of course sometimes we get it all wrong, and for a period take up with friends we will later forsake. In all these cases, friendship and love prove non-fungible. Toting up reasons why someone is likeable does not guarantee that we will like her, and the reasons that seemingly underlie our affection for one person do not guarantee that we will like others possessing similar traits. The varied trajectories that animate our interpersonal relationships recur when we seek to model our connections to works of art. Some works and artists remain favorites, mirroring the role of lifelong friends. But new works are constantly vying for our attention, and our loyalties can shift. Sometimes we are at a moment in life that makes us newly open to a hitherto unappreciated work, genre, artist, etc. This may make for a lasting bond or just trigger a temporary fling. As with interpersonal connections, we can take on new aesthetic enthusiasms of which we eventually come to tire, though it seems odd to think mere aesthetic flings might later prompt regret. The point is this: any account of how we profit from critical advice must acknowledge the multifarious ways our aesthetic likes and dislikes can form and grow. I believe the analogy between appreciating art and cultivating friends breaks down in one key respect. Summary evaluations and reasoned exhortations do not drive our decisions about our conspecifics. Most of us are drawn to many different people with whom we connect in many different ways. Since we do not generally attempt a ranking of individual worth, we don’t recommend new friends because of their overall superiority to friends already in place. Granted, services like eharmony and Match.com attempting to promote romantic love, and matchmakers in many cultures, aspire to present worthy partners. Comparisons and checklists no doubt come into play when competing romantic candidates are assessed. But any

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ranking would be relative to the needs, taste, interest, values, etc., of the client using the service in question. The idea of determining an overall objective value for each suitor seems a nonstarter. Such an approach seems even less likely for forming friendships. Friendship flowers gradually, fueled by chance encounters, shared interests, growing appreciation of compatibility. Moreover, friends fill different niches; we don’t expect any one friend to complete us. In sum, neither friendship nor love evolves in a straightforward, rule-governed way, and both prove non-fungible as noted above. Thus the justificatory structure I have claimed is in place to aid our understanding and appreciation of works of art does not carry over to the personal realm. Consider X, described to me as a person who is curious and open-minded, loves to hike, and has a weakness for turtles. I would initially find X of interest on these grounds. Yet I would not expect them to compel others—a fondness for reptiles is not widely distributed, and in all likelihood shopping has more fans than hiking. Even for me, other traits could come to outweigh this attractive constellation. Suppose X is sarcastic, or condescending, or greedy about verbal space, or suppose X avidly supports political views I abhor. A nascent friendship may die. Transferring these thoughts to romantic love makes the situation even more complex as pheromones, fetishes, and other determinants of sexual attraction come into play. I have been arguing that the analogy between appreciating new works of art and cultivating new friends breaks down. A notion central to Levinson’s account of appreciation—namely, the overall worth of works— does not come into play in friendship or romance. We don’t engage in the summary ranking of our fellow humans when deciding which suitors to pursue, which acquaintances to cultivate. Masterpiece status has no parallel here. And even if comparative reasons come in play, the reasons that speak to one person need not be in any way objective. I suspect that the rails along which friendship rolls are even less likely to approximate anything like logical assessment. Yet Levinson’s neo-Humean view embraces the notion of summary value.17 His account of critical advice suggests that we can rank works of art and that we can be led to new aesthetic preferences by critical argument and exhortation. Why might the aesthetic realm differ? Perhaps Levinson has simply gotten it wrong when it comes to measuring satisfaction. His claim about the benefits of following an ideal critic comes to this: experiencing a better work of art will yield better aesthetic experience. Even relativized to critics whose taste we share, this claim threatens to involve a non sequitur.18 Does the modifier “better” distrib-

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ute through the second clause? That is, do encounters with better works guarantee better aesthetic experience? If not, then something is amiss with Levinson’s story. Consider some reasons to block the move from better art to better aesthetic experience. The greater effort required to engage with a more challenging work might weigh against Levinson’s calculations. The cost of forsaking familiar favorites must also be added in. And finally, the better work might simply not be to our liking. This would a brute fact about us, a result of the distinctive aesthetic sensibility each of us possesses, whose formation we explored a few paragraphs back. Can these objections be countered? A concrete example might aid our assessment of the situation. Let’s focus on the art of literature and consider the satisfaction an amateur might receive from swapping her favorite reads for works recommended by an appropriate critic, one whose taste she shares. Levinson would insist such a reader is setting herself up for more rewarding aesthetic experiences. With the art of literature, worthier works are likely to acquaint us with fuller and more memorable characters, more serious themes, more complex plots. Processing these yields intellectual challenges and rewards. Such works also push our emotional capacities, demanding empathy for characters and situations possibly unlike any we have met or imagined. The initial insights on offer here stem from acquaintance with the fictional world; in reading we enter and explore the world of the work. But attention to this world also prompts appreciation of the manner and skill with which it is created and delivered. We thereby become aware of an author’s style and technique. In our toting up we might also include meta-responses like those Susan Feagin outlines in her account of tragedy.19 She proposes that readers acknowledge and applaud their own sensitivity as they follow the details of the unfolding plot and engage with sad works. It may be that a similar congratulatory effect obtains when we allow the ideal critic to raise our sights to more challenging works, though these must still be of types that can catch our interest. Finally, we also join a cohort of readers who appreciate these achievements, thus the delights of likemindedness provide an additional reward. Does my sketch of the benefits of reading challenging works support Levinson’s claim about increased satisfaction? Suppose we do agree to attempt to follow the ideal critic’s advice. Can we come to like the substitute work? The underlying question is this: with enough energy, dedication, and good will, can we make ourselves genuinely interested in anything? The relevant parameters are framed in assorted ways by our discussion to date. Hume rightly points out that the trajectories along which our tastes

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develop are shaped by temperament, age, and culture as well as the vagaries of intervening experience. Ribeiro’s account of the ways luck contributes to the development of individual aesthetic sensibility is consilient with Hume’s claims. Finally, Levinson acknowledges that appreciators will divide their time among assorted pleasures, and that ideal critics will invariably spend down time with works of lesser value without feeling tempted to reassess the overall rankings they assign them.20 We must allow amateurs similar leeway while acknowledging that the dangers of backsliding may be more likely for them, at least until new preferences are cemented and overall sights are raised. So again, will we— can we— come to appreciate the worthier works the critic recommends? Return to our thought experiment. If a reader is happily indulging in some escapist reading, the critic who plucks the Carl Hiassen novel or Martha Grimes mystery from her hand, replacing it with Moby Dick, The Sound and the Fury, or Ulysses will not earn her gratitude. We need some more fine-grained account of the substitutes on offer. Some version of both Hume’s blameless differences and our Suitability Requirement should be in play here. Thus our reader might be happier replacing a Carl Hiaasen novel with a work by Barbara Kingsolver or Kent Harup than a classic from Faulkner. If these substitutes don’t propel her far enough into the realm of masterpieces, we can imagine a number of classic works that might be more to her taste than the trio named above. What about something by Dickens, Tolstoy, or Austen? With each of these authors, human interest is foregrounded rather than more abstract themes or off-putting stylistic innovations. Or perhaps she could be detoured to a contemporary novel more ambitious than the book she had in hand—a work by Toni Morrison, A. S. Byatt, or Phillip Roth? Each might speak to her by connecting with her take on contemporary issues and real-life concerns. My attempt to chart an imagined reader’s receptivity to critical suggestion does not decisively vindicate Levinson’s claim. But there is one clear flaw in the thought experiment I have proposed. Namely, ideal critics do not swoop in, Big-Brother style, and wrest books from our hands. Instead we generally choose to consult criticism to aid us in making a choice. So we are looking for guidance and hope to grow, perhaps elevate, our taste. In such situations we are uniquely open to reconfiguring our preference set. In addition, there are many ways we can recruit critics to aid this task. Recall my survey in chapter 1 of the various ways criticism can be accessed. If I am looking for a book to read, I can do a google search, skim through Amazon reviews, bring up columns from my favorite newspapers, con-

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sult publisher’s websites, attend readings, read the short blurbs on paperback covers, seek advice from friends. . . . Presumably such searching can yield suggestions—recommendations of works I’ll find challenging yet congenial. We should also acknowledge a second use of criticism pointed out in my opening chapter, namely, after-the-fact consultation to deepen understanding of works already encountered. Many of us, puzzled by a poem or novel we have read, a film we have seen, look to critics to validate or if necessary reformulate our first tentative understandings of our aesthetic experience. In such cases critics are not antecedently shaping our choices or telling us how to allot our time. Rather, they are coming to our aid. We have put out a call for help and, like travelers seeking roadside assistance, we await the arrival of the expert. When the problem case is a literary work, critics help us with what philosophers Noël Carroll and Peter Lamarque count among the constitutive tasks of reading— clarification, explication, elucidation, interpretation, and, ultimately, evaluation.21 Since we are actively seeking help, we are likely to be open to critical suggestion. And if we are persuaded that the critic(s) we consult do indeed understand and appreciate the work in question, then we are likely to adopt aspects of their view. In this way we acquire a sense of a work’s component parts, its aims and innovations, and become better positioned to judge its overall success and value. We have agreed that no antecedent formula can decisively predict what new works a novice appreciator will come to like. But regarding our test case, the art of literature, consider a central claim from J. Hillis Miller’s book On Literature. Miller proposes that the opening sentences of a successful novel offer an irresistible invitation that propels us into the fictional world. He deems these initial words “radically inaugural” and explains, “They are the creation, in each case, of a new, alternative, universe.”22 Miller bases his theory in part on fond memories of his childhood infatuation with The Swiss Family Robinson. When browsing for books in a bookstore— or online, on Amazon—I often conduct a test that aligns with Miller’s view. I open books at random, read the opening sentence(s), and see whether I am intrigued, drawn in. The test works in the opposite direction as well. I have just given up on a book whose opening chapters failed to capture me, despite the recommendation from a valued friend. We must also allow for situations where I am not captured by those opening lines, or even by opening chapter(s), yet persevere and eventually find myself admiring the work. Indifference or perhaps tepid/qualified accep-

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tance is eventually transformed into something closer to enthusiasm. Here the friendship analogy is in place, as this mirrors the case of friends who grow on us. One last variant must be added in when we evaluate Levinson’s view regarding our attraction to new works of art. Most aestheticians would agree that it is possible to correctly assess works we don’t in fact like. That is, the verdict “Good of its kind, though not for me” seems to be one that insightful appreciators can appropriately deliver. This would apply to cases where critics do indeed “get us to see” as they do (recall the discussion of Isenberg in chapter 4). New aspects of the work emerge for us. But we don’t necessarily engage emotionally and embrace the piece. We formulate a more distanced acknowledgement of its strengths without these holding sway over us. In such cases we can generate informed and useful assessments and comparisons, but our enthusiasm remains muted, our emotional connection to the work on hold. We would expect such results when following recommendations from critics whose taste we do not share. But the portfolios of ideal critics are capacious, and even critics whose taste we share may recommend some works that cannot win us over. The scenario under consideration still supports Levinson’s claim if we come to understand why those works were championed. We can then concede that they could deliver superior aesthetic experience to a differently situated reader. Or ourselves at some different time or different stage in life. These last remarks call for this reminder: it is not just a match of temperament and taste that matters here. The conditions under which we engage new works also come into play and impact the success of each introduction. Recall Hume’s discussion of the internal disorders and external hindrances that can block proper appreciation. Our receptivity is conditioned by all sorts of factors, in fact, by how our life is going overall. Whether I am feeling cranky, or sleep deprived, or insecure, or romantically smitten can affect what works I might like on a given day, which opening sentences might have the effect Miller examines. It can seem a wonder that we ever raise our sights. I will close this section by returning briefly to a topic taken up in chapter 3, namely, the suggestion that we can dispense with the Humean machinery and simply become our own critics by cultivating in ourselves the traits Hume singles out. Carroll considers this option at the end of his paper “Hume’s Standard of Taste,” and Paul Guyer entertains a similar line of thought in “The Standard of Taste and the ‘Most Ardent Desire of Society.’”23 Can we simply eliminate the need for Humean critics by becoming

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autodidacts and our own source of critical aid? Both authors mentioned, Carroll and Guyer, relinquish this idea. Considerations of efficiency undermine its appeal, as only an extensive division of labor allows critics to amass the requisite practice and comparison that positions them to properly judge specific works, artists, schools, genres, and more. Guyer makes clear that even well-motivated students cannot effectively go it alone. His point is that the task of amassing sufficient practice and comparison to properly appreciate works from the whole history of (in this case) Western art requires that ideal critics in the present stand on the shoulders of their predecessors.24 There is also the issue of inherent qualifications. Not every appreciator who aspires to become her own critic has the requisite perceptual (delicacy), analytical (good sense), or temperamental (freedom from prejudice) endowments and abilities for carrying out this task.

doe s foLLowing CriTiCAL AdviCe ThreATen our Au Then TiCiT y? When the advice of critics or the arguments of friends succeed in altering our preferences, the last of Levinson’s worries comes into play. If our aesthetic tastes in part define who we are, aren’t we sacrificing something of ourselves, our authenticity, if we alter our preferences to follow critical recommendations? Moreover, doesn’t successfully following this path threaten a collective loss of individuality, as more and more of us converge in this reshaped taste? The first question, about authenticity, operates at an intrapersonal level, voicing the concern that we jettison important components of our personal identity when we give up our early aesthetic enthusiasms. By contrast the second question, about what we might call indistinguishability, points to an interpersonal concern—that we become too much like one another if we let critical advice reshape our taste. In “Artistic Worth and Personal Taste,” Levinson offers a nuanced response to these challenges. Critics serve an important role in indicating the proper destinations for our aesthetic journeys. They point to works that merit the appreciation of mature taste. There are many such resting points. Since our starting points will differ, those of us who improve our taste necessarily follow different routes to these final destinations. Yet the early choices that we make and then abandon imprint us in various ways, shaping our mature selves and generating fond recollections. In this manner, Levinson aims to establish the compatibility between a mandated set of approved works and variations in both personal taste and the paths its education traces. He

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achieves this by (1) recasting the destination not as a single set of canonical works, but rather a set of sets, equivalence classes of equally worthy works; and (2) retaining echoes of the journey each of us took in coming to appreciate some subset of that array. In sum, by complicating the destination and valorizing the journey, Levinson seeks to make room for differences in taste while still acknowledging a normative role for criticism. Levinson offers some musical illustrations to support his position. Regarding clause (1), he proposes that many artists should be considered “roughly on a par or possessed of a roughly equal artistic value” (AW, p.  232). He lists Mozart, Beethoven, John Coltrane, Charlie Parker, the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones as examples constituting such an equivalence class. They contrast with musical artists of lesser value, such as Tartini, Ludwig Spohr, Stanley Turentine, and the Eagles. We may have once championed these figures, but abandon them en route to our mature taste. I agree with Levinson that the two sets of composers and musicians he presents are worlds apart when we think of quality. Mozart and Beethoven are monumental figures in the history of Western classical musical. Tartini and Spohr were prolific composers, highly popular in their time, but their reputations have waned. A similar gulf divides the pairs of rock and of jazz musicians Levinson cites from the lesser exemplars listed, though the notion of “masterpiece” sits a little less comfortably in these latter two musical realms, perhaps because of the privileging of live performance over capturing works via a score. Still, tracing lines of influence and marking moments of innovation allow us to draw distinctions and sort both rock and jazz artists according to quality. Levinson’s musical examples are drawn from relatively narrow and easily specified categories— classical pieces displaying (mature) sonataallegro form, 1960s British rock, bebop and free jazz. To specify equivalence classes in other arts, we might have to similarly look to the notions of style and/or genre. For example, in painting, we can tap acknowledged masterpieces in a variety of categories—landscape, portraiture, Impressionist works, hard- edged abstraction, and so on. Proceeding with contemporary works in this manner is more difficult, as all the issues surrounding application of the test of time recur. Still, critical consensus can be expected to gel after a certain amount of time has passed. We can also enlist the approach used here in building a neo-Humean view to identify equivalence classes of more recent worthy works. The notion of critic clusters spelled out at the start of this chapter indicates a way to track aesthetic value in principle. Works that belong in Levinsonian equivalence classes

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would be those endorsed by a preponderance of properly situated critics. We could then pluck those at the pinnacle of each school, style, movement, or genre. What of the test case we have been exploring in this chapter, the art of literature? How do worthy works cluster here? Appreciators can be fans of works as disparate as a hermetic sonnet, an expansive piece of free-verse, a plot-driven multigenerational novel, a more experimental work that plays with unreliable narration or shifting points of view. Novices who embark on a journey to hone their literary taste will surely be drawn to different genres. That is, they might become enthusiasts of Donne or Shakespeare, Wordsworth or Byron, Yeats or Stevens, George Eliot or Jane Austen, John Barth or William Gass, David Foster Wallace or Jonathan Franzen, and on. These choices seem to me to parallel the structure Levinson set up when offering equivalence classes of worthy musical works. For example, fans of poetry might declare for Donne, Marvell, Pope, Keats, Dickinson, Frost, Stevens, Moore, Ashbery, Plath, and on. All merit admiration, but this list—which can be endlessly supplemented— offers many disparate places for educated taste to reside. Appreciators who form allegiances to different poets on this list retain their individuality yet all engage with literary icons and works for the ages. In his book On Criticism, Noël Carroll cautions readers against what he considers “a misplaced emphasis on the critical comparison of artworks, especially for the purpose of ranking them—as if critics were essentially aesthetical accountants” (188).25 He ridicules the “parlor game” (my term) of determining which is greater, As You Like It, the Parthenon, or the WellTempered Clavier. We can easily generate a very large set of equally unanswerable quality quizzes: Paradise Lost versus Beethoven’s 5th, Guernica versus Death of a Salesman, Citizen Kane versus Balanchine’s Jewels. I believe Carroll’s concern can be extended to comparisons within a given art. It seems fruitless to debate whether Paradise Lost outweighs Middlemarch, whether The Great Gatsby trumps “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” All are major works, great of their kind. Perhaps we can more easily rank works within a given literary category. One might claim they are trying in some sense to accomplish the same task, indicated by our characterization of the framing category, so their relative success might provide a comparative measure of overall worth.26 But this is surely too pat, as it overlooks the many dimensions along which artists can put their individual stamp on shared genres, forms, themes, subjects. Comparable works can excel in different ways, and the assessment relevant to the present discussion

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seeks not to declare a “winner” for each contest—a zero-sum approach to aesthetic excellence—but rather to identify a cohort of valued works that could populate Levinson-style equivalence classes. Novices relying on critical advice to elevate/improve their literary taste can embrace works in quite different categories and different works within a given category depending on their background, interests, life circumstances, and more. We can underscore the plausibility of this claim by returning to the realm from which Levinson drew his initial examples, classical music. There seems to be plenty of room for individuality when we focus on a given period, style, or genre, in fact even when we focus on the oeuvre of a given composer. That is, some appreciators might concentrate on Mozart’s development of symphonic form across forty-one compositions, while others might be more satisfied delving into the profundities of Beethoven’s much smaller symphonic output. All would be interacting with great works. Even within Mozart’s oeuvre, there is room for individuality to exert a stamp. Devotees of vocal music will end up with a different play list than fans of chamber music, while orchestral followers will land in yet a different portion of Mozart’s output. Given that we are tracing artistic quality, we should assume that none of these listeners will remain devoted above all to Mozart’s juvenilia—those works he composed before hitting his teen years— once they have been exposed to some of his mature creations. While I have frequently downplayed the assigning of summary value to works of art, focusing instead on the ascription of aesthetic qualities, I don’t mean to totally turn my back on the notion of artistic worth. Hume’s comparisons of Milton to Ogilby and Addison to Bunyan have not aged well, but we can—another parlor game—formulate pairings today that present clear contrasts in quality. It is also particularly tempting to make summary claims when looking at an artist’s overall career. Since the comparison class is other works from the same hand, we can rank works more confidently. Some might represent the first approximations of concerns, approaches, solutions, that are mastered later on, while late works might represent a falling off, cases of artists becoming repetitive, less daring, pursuing dead ends. Overall, there seems to be ample room for individuality when we consider the possible trajectories of changed taste as a response to critical advice. The suitability requirement will be in place here. Recall as well the takeaways from our discussion of two relevant analogies—the cultivation of friends and the pursuit of romance. In theory, appreciators are open to

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rational persuasion from critics pointing out the properties—the strengths and weaknesses— of candidate works. Each individual appreciator is encouraged to raise his or her sights, forsake some current favorites in order to get acquainted with richer, more rewarding work. Clearly this can be accomplished without having each novice lock in the very same set of revised preferences. It is quite unlikely that our neophytes are in danger of becoming too like one another in terms of their aesthetic interests. Thus Levinson’s indistinguishability worry voiced above is not born out when we examine the downstream results of critical advice. Let me note one last consideration that bears on the indistinguishability problem. If we delimit the varying matrices of same taste—liking works of the same style, school, or genre, liking works by the same artist, or, most narrow of all, liking the very same work—all but the last possibility can figure in the construction of equivalence classes. But each and every one can offer a countervailing benefit. Convergence and overlap, when they do occur, can be a good thing. On such occasions we join a cohort of appreciators, and the delights of like-mindedness provide an additional reward. Levinson discounts this particular benefit. He suggests that moral and aesthetic cases are disanalogous, in that coordination is prized in the one, differentiation in the other: “morality, unlike aesthetics, does not appear to be a field for expressing one’s individuality” (AW, p. 231). Ted Cohen’s account of jokes suggests a counterargument. In his witty yet serious paper, “Jokes,” Cohen proposes that the transactions involved in telling and getting jokes unite people by establishing a shared sense of humor.27 Something similar takes place with works of art. Tolstoy’s proposal in What Is Art? (1898) instantiates this approach, as he locates the value of art in the (religious-based) fellow-feeling with which successful artists infect their appreciators. Some aspects of Tolstoy’s model carry forward to the present day. For instance, we argue energetically about movies seen together to persuade others to adopt our point of view, thus building a community of taste. When we argue about art with our taste peers, as opposed to actual or ideal critics, we are trying to persuade them to share our point of view, to like the works we like, and to find the same grounds for admiring them. One might object that amateurs enjoy this benefit before being uplifted by critical advice. Consider the avid following assembled by such artists as Thomas Kinkade, Ken Follett, or Yanni. We can accommodate this point by making our conclusion two-pronged: appreciators who elevate their tastes put themselves in line for more rewarding aesthetic experiences without having to sacrifice the social and psychological rewards

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of like-mindedness as they join new cohorts when they come to admire works that critics recommend. In fleshing out Levinson’s proposal about equivalence classes of worthy works, we saw that the Indistinguishability Problem is not especially gripping. This interpersonal concern—the worry that we compromise our identity by becoming too like all the critic’s other followers—fades once we acknowledge the vast number of worthy works competing for our attention. But its intra-personal counterpart, the Authenticity Problem—the worry that we erode our identity in a different way when taking up a critic’s recommendations has us jettison the preferences that shaped our earlier selves—seems to still have traction. Levinson tries to mitigate this concern in two ways. I turn to them next. Levinson’s solution to the Problem of Authenticity was indicated above. It involves honoring the unique trajectories we each follow in improving our taste, acknowledging the personal and sentimental value of works whose aesthetic merit we may have come to question. As Levinson puts this, we retain a faiblesse for the works and artists we discarded in pursuit of aesthetic perfection (AW, p. 232); we are each “inalterably the person who formerly preferred this and that work of lesser value” (AW, p. 231). And since my faiblesses don’t match yours, the convergence of our tastes later in life does not erase the earlier enthusiasms that shaped and differentiated our younger selves. Moreover, such transformations are not confined to our passage from childhood. As adults, we may become newly and suddenly open to a particular artist, work, or genre, and this may cause us to reassess our standing aesthetic loyalties. Yet we needn’t forget the importance those works newly left behind once held for us. For example, becoming struck by the narrative complexities of Mark Haddon’s novel The Red House—an accumulation of engrossing snippets offering piecemeal glimpses into the points of view of the eight central characters—may make me newly receptive to Virginia Woolf and less tolerant of the more standard narrative structures of John Updike, despite his oft-praised prose style. Yet I remain the reader who enthusiastically gobbled up each new New Yorker story chronicling the suburban discontent of Richard and Joan Maples and the eventual disintegration of their marriage, also the reader who happily moved on to sample Updike’s Rabbit quartet which probed many of the same problems through the life of his protagonist Rabbit Angstrom. This appreciative route, from Updike through Haddon to Woolf, sits alongside the many other such routes that culminate in my present literary preference set. Together, they mark me uniquely. Recall our proposed

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Millian Requirement. It was suggested there that each incremental rise in the quality of valued items—hedonic pleasures in Mill’s original case, aesthetic pleasures in ours—should be treated on the model of a ratchet. We retain ties to the works for which, in Levinson’s term, we maintain a faiblesse, and this aspect of our appreciative histories distinguishes us from one another. But it is extremely unlikely that we will recant and once again privilege those discarded works. In the closing section of “Artistic Worth,” Levinson offers one final response to the authenticity challenge. He proposes that appreciators retain their individuality, even as their maturing taste converges on works that countless others also admire, because they all have “different responses,” resulting in “different aesthetic experiences of the works” (AW, p. 232). Levinson concedes that such differences will not always be observable. He contrasts our shared “outward” aesthetic behavior— our choices among works—with our “inward” aesthetic responses (AW, p. 232). Just what range of response can be expected here? Consider our uptake of aesthetic properties. Their acknowledgement is certainly a crucial—and foundational— aspect of aesthetic appreciation. In his eight-fold taxonomy of aesthetic properties, Alan Goldman recognizes one category that he labels evocative properties. Noël Carroll includes a similar category, reaction properties, in his account.28 Both categories involve cases where the appreciator must actually be sent into a specific state—being bored by boring works, stirred by stirring works, amused by amusing ones, and so on. No such regimentation is required in registering other types of aesthetic properties. Of course, individuals will express boredom, excitement, amusement, in varying ways.29 But there is much greater variation in the case of the remaining aesthetic property types, those that do not mandate a specific response as a criterion of uptake. That is, in characterizing a work— or a region or aspect of a work—as delicate, insipid, bold, garish, sad, derivative, and so on, no specific manner of registering this judgment is required. Can variations at this level of response, which Levinson deems inward, stave off worries about authenticity by providing markers of our individuality? It may be useful to once again fill in a gap by appealing to earlier writings by Levinson. In his 1992 paper “What Is Aesthetic Pleasure?,” he suggests that appreciators must discern not only a work’s aesthetic properties, but also the way in which they depend on and flow from its lower-level perceptual and structural properties. He declares: “Pleasure in an object is aesthetic when it derives from apprehension of and reflection on the object’s individual character and content, both for itself and in relation to

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the structural base on which it rests.”30 In setting out this claim, Levinson is insistent that content and character supervene on more low-level perceptual (and, in the case of literature, cognitive) properties, and that “appreciation of them, if properly aesthetic, involves awareness of that dependency” (6). These dependencies are what appreciators cite when asked to justify their aesthetic claims.31 Clearly, few arts appreciators are up on the latest philosophical treatises on supervenience. So we are not knowingly recruiting such theories when we ascribe aesthetic qualities to works. Rather, we simply indicate what the works present to our scrutiny. While ideal critics can be expected to do so with a mastery of relevant supporting facts, the rest of us will inevitably be engaging in partial and imperfect appreciation. It follows that our responses will fall short of the ideal set in myriad ways. But they will also differ from those of other apprentice appreciators in that our diverse histories will yield varying patterns of attention, interest, and association. As a result, our aesthetic assessments, even as they converge on an approved set of works, will differ in detail as we adopt different ways of noting those key dependencies that Levinson emphasizes. For example, in realizing that a work is derivative, we will recruit different comparison classes; in deeming a work sad, we will be affected by vastly different standing and momentary concerns and be varyingly susceptible to Tolstoy-style contagion. The differences just cited underlie our shared acknowledgement that the works are derivative and sad, respectively, and they shape the justifications we would offer to defend these claims. The suggestion that we are set apart by our appreciative responses is borne out by some of our earlier discussion of reading. Recall J. Hillis Miller’s claim that successful literary works pull us in with opening sentences that effectively capture our interest and catapult us into the world of the work.32 Think how differently we each respond to Kafka’s description of Gregor Samsa waking up to discover himself transformed into a monstrous vermin, to Tolstoy’s claim that unhappy families are all unhappy in their own way, to Austen’s opening observation that that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife depending on our attitudes toward insects, our childhood experiences, our marital status. However, differences of this sort affect all our epistemic and affective life. Our transactions with the world are inevitably informed by our own unique patterns of access and analysis. Thus what Levinson called our “inward aesthetic responses” will indeed drive our aesthetic judgments; they will guide the changes in preference that prompt worries about conformity. But these dif-

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ferentia will be discernible to others only if we choose to comment on our experiences or offer justifications for our choices; moreover, the underlying details may not always be available even to us. We may well ascribe aesthetic properties to works of art without being explicitly aware of the dependencies on which they rest. In such cases, our responses are somewhat attenuated. There is no specific state we must enter in order to register the aesthetic facts. While a satisfactory resolution of this issue may well require a fullblown theory of personal identity, I don’t believe we should seek to secure our identity through appeal to hidden differences. Since the dilemma about authenticity that Levinson has called to our attention arose with respect to outward, public choices—the array of works we come to admire after guidance from the critic—any reassurance about our identity ought to inhabit that same public level. That is, we should reject Levinson’s appeal to distinctive inward responses. Note that Levinson’s previous point about our retained faiblesse for earlier works we admired but then discarded does offer an identity-preserving construction that inhabits the public realm. I believe a similar approach is called for in this last instance. It is our public choices, rather than our private responses, that both raise and quell concerns about converging taste. Between them, Hume and Levinson offer resources that allow us to satisfy concerns about authenticity. As a result, Levinson’s differentiation of aesthetic responses needn’t come into play.

C onCLu sion In the end, I believe we should be sanguine about the prospects for a neoHumean account of aesthetic appreciation. Hume’s posit of blameless differences together with Levinson’s formulation of equivalence classes of worthy works generate a suitably rich account that allows appreciators to develop individualized taste while providing sufficient apparatus to support the objectivity of aesthetic judgments. The result is a nuanced form of aesthetic realism, one answerable to the complexities of the real world. Hume’s acknowledgement of blameless differences indicates that our mature taste is not a single template that all attain. Levinson’s complication of equivalence classes provides a second ground for variation. The two requirements set out above allow for further refinement of this account. The Suitability Requirement limits not only the works critics can appropriately judge, but also those they can effectively recommend to their tutees. It is the case that even novice appreciators can only come to like works of types

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capable of triggering their interests. The Millian Requirement is relevant here as well. Once tutored by critics whose taste we share, we become acquainted with an expanded set of works. This enlarged comparison class forces us to reject the works of lesser value in our experiential set. Thus the Suitability Requirement limits the set of great works we can appreciate, while the Millian Requirement mutes our relation to the lesser works we admired in the past. Yet neither of Levinson’s initial worries comes to fruition. While the verdicts of ideal critics do establish a hierarchy, the dissemination of critical advice allows individual appreciators to develop their own taste without excessive regimentation or restriction.

7 · Some Applications

I close by examining some applications of the principles I’ve defended in the course of this book. The first case I take up is that of nature appreciation. Components and features of the natural world are singled out as paradigm cases of beauty; sublime and picturesque exemplars abound as well. While the natural world offers us countless opportunities for aesthetic delight at both the macro- and the micro-level, the notions of criticism and instruction do not seem in place. Some might suggest that the tradition of nature writing can fill this gap, providing advice on experiences worth pursuing as well as landscapes worth preserving. Considering this proposal requires that we ponder why we find some landscapes, but not others, attractive, and entertain the possibility that in this realm suitability is trumped by adaptive or evolutionary factors making aspects of our appreciation hard-wired. Next I consider some puzzles that arise in the appreciation of a trio of arts, literature, film, and architecture. I group the first two together as narrative arts, as they typically function to tell a story. In Hume’s time, literature was considered the worthiest of the arts, and into the present era literature has been at the heart of battles about criticism and canons. Yet in some ways literature remains an outlier among the arts, a status that flows from the underlying distinction between paragraphs and pictures. Unlike pictures, descriptions of any real or imagined scene bring with them an inevitable indeterminateness. As a result, the appreciative task inevitably involves some degree of filling in. We confront further riddles in trying to demarcate aesthetic qualities of literary works and in identifying the components of literary style. All these issues make the appreciation of literature, and thus the correlative contribution of critical aid, problematic. While film too is a storytelling art par excellence, a different set of puzzles

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takes root here. In his paper “The Power of Movies,” Noël Carroll argues that film is the most accessible of arts. Yet we can be at a loss to determine what a particular film means overall or how to understand a specific character, incident, or subplot. Adaptations of literary works and remakes of previous films pose puzzles about work identity; they also raise intriguing questions about just how much we need to know about such genetic matters in order to fully appreciate a film. Our propensity to revisit favorite films also introduces a riddle about suspense. Why is it that we continue to enjoy repeat viewings of suspenseful films when we know full well how they will end? Architecture is another art whose appreciation seems difficult to parse. It stands apart from other arts in that works of architecture are entered, lived in, and used. Architecture also condones a distinctive phenomenon, adding onto others’ work. Compare the horror we would feel were there competitions to choose painters who would add additional figures to Picasso’s Guernica, or composers who would add additional measures to Beethoven’s Fifth. Can we specify what might make for “friendly” or consilient additions? And would those be what we would want to build? I would not be right to conclude this study without a brief examination of identity politics and their bearing on criticism in the arts. We are an increasingly fragmented society. Many of us take pride in our racial, ethnic, and religious origins and identities, some seek to assimilate and shed them. But what if anything follows about the permissible crossing of these boundaries for the purposes of creating or critiquing art? Lastly I turn to a pair of issues, bad art and mean critics, that have been lurking in the background of many of my discussions. It seems undeniable that an eviscerating review has a certain allure, and some critics are famous for their vitriol. I argue that we cannot formulate general criteria for bad art. Yet there are unworthy works. Faced with a harsh or dismissive review, we should ask whether prejudice has contributed and/or whether the suitability requirement has been overlooked. If neither possibility is confirmed, then the review in question takes its place among legitimate responses. Taking up these final normative questions completes my account of how practical criticism can be vibrant and useful.

nAT ure AppreCiATion Nature in general, natural scenes, and specific natural objects are frequently cited by aestheticians as instances of beauty. In the world of art, appreciators make use of criticism to select new works to engage and to

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deepen their understanding of works already sampled. Is there any parallel use of criticism to enhance appreciation of the natural world? A number of present- day aestheticians have attempted to theorize nature appreciation. In the 1980s and 1990s Allen Carlson published a series of seminal papers that were for many the last word on this endeavor. Carlson gives scientific knowledge pride of place in his account; Noël Carroll has weighed in to give emotional response to the natural world its due; and Emily Brady has defended an integrated theory that includes all our faculties—imagination, emotion, and knowledge—in an account of proper appreciation.1 My goal here is to determine whether the notions of expertise and suitability that were foregrounded in our neo-Humean account of art criticism find equally central roles in the appreciation of nature. But I need to preface this discussion with a quick exploration of that crucial term “nature.” Trying to carefully circumscribe this notion proves surprisingly difficult. “Nature” is often taken to mean wild nature or wilderness. And this in turn is glossed as a landscape, environment, ecosystem, or even a set of entities that has been uninfluenced by human activity. That is, the generally received view of nature takes nature and human activity to be antithetical notions. But starting with a seemingly commonsense contrast between nature and culture, we can quickly find ourselves plunged into paradox. This is because we can formulate arguments to endorse each of two contradictory conclusions: (1) that everything is nature, and (2) that everything is culture and there is no nature left. The first conclusion follows if we take humans to be natural creatures who evolved from primordial slime; given this assumption, everything we do and create is natural as well, no different from beavers building dams, bees fashioning hives, corals forming reefs. If we instead think of human activity as distinctively cultural and so non-natural, we have to conclude that no aspect of the natural world is uninfluenced by our doings. Acid rain, radioactive fallout, pollution, global warming have touched and altered every part of the globe. If so, then our cultural activity has affected the entirety of our world; there is no untrammeled nature left. I don’t want to become stalled out by this debate. While I agree that our received commonsense view takes nature to mean wild nature, with problematic results, I also believe we should remedy this situation by acknowledging that the concept in fact applies in degrees.2 On this construal, some sites are more natural than others, and over time an area’s degree of naturalness can change in either direction. In addition, this approach en-

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courages us to see traces of nature almost anywhere, as this label no longer applies only to vast tracts of land that can’t be crossed in a day and where nothing man-made appears on the horizon.3 Our ability to “zoom in,” to shift our focus from macro- to micro-level features of our environment, allows us to find bits of nature—a bird flying overhead, a weed blooming in a sidewalk crack, a constellation in the night sky—in even the most developed of urban settings. The possibilities of restored and even of artificial nature further complicate this story.4 My interest in the discussion that follows is nature perception anywhere along this vast continuum. Having said a bit to characterize nature, let me turn to the task of appreciation. Can we model nature appreciation on the appreciation of art? Works of art fulfill varied functions. Certainly some present beauty for our delectation, and this transaction is often foregrounded by those attempting to theorize nature appreciation. But beauty is not necessary to art, and artworks can aspire to do much more: present assorted aesthetic and non-aesthetic properties, display arresting formal patterns, represent aspects of the real world, create alternative fictional worlds, express and/or arouse emotions, communicate their creators’ thoughts and feelings, recount narratives, make claims, teach lessons, and inform us about the human condition. Philosophers proposing essentialist theories of art make reference to many of these traits, and critics trying to school us will point them out with added gloss. Yet few of these functions carry over to the natural world. For example, any that demand an intentionalist interpretation—that is, that require reference to a creator’s aims— seem inapplicable.5 Nature is not generally understood to be about something outside itself. Nature lacks intentionality in philosopher Franz Brentano’s sense of that term.6 Present-day nature lovers generally want to know about the scenes they view, the landscapes through which they move, the features, both macroand micro-, that they discern. In his influential article “Aesthetic Appreciation of the Natural Environment,” Allen Carlson offers an account of what appreciation amounts to in such circumstances.7 In setting out his view, Carlson urges us to eschew the art/nature analogy even in those instances where it seems congenial. Thus he rejects two models of appreciation, one he calls the Object Model, the other the Landscape Model. The first treats environmental features like discrete objects and so on analogy with a piece of sculpture, while the second treats the environment on analogy with a sequence of landscape paintings. Carlson rejects both approaches because in excising a piece of nature they lose the ability to speak to its complex

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relationships to its surroundings, its place in a sustaining ecosystem. They also fail to acknowledge our immersion in the natural world as we experience it through various perceptual, proprioceptive, and kinesthetic modalities.8 Carlson does, however, insist that nature appreciation parallels art appreciation in one key respect. Just as there exists a background of history and theory that contextualizes our understanding of works of art, Carlson maintains there must be an equivalent theoretical background that guides and facilitates our aesthetic appreciation of nature. Carlson counsels us to recruit both science and common sense to fill this gap: “Thus although we have not created nature, we yet know a great deal about it. This knowledge, essentially common sense/scientific knowledge, seems to me the only viable candidate for playing the role in regard to our appreciation of nature which our knowledge of types of art, artistic traditions, and the like plays in regard to the appreciation of art.”9 Thus in the end, Carlson analogizes the epistemological underpinnings of art appreciation and nature appreciation. Consider how our understanding of a landscape painting by Frederic Church might be enhanced by knowing about the artist’s religious beliefs, his travels to South America, and the work of his teacher Thomas Cole, founder of the Hudson River School. These help us reconstruct Church’s sense of the scene he pictures, foregrounding aesthetic qualities consilient with this vision (mysterious, powerful, revelatory, awe-inspiring). In similar fashion, our appreciation of an actual Canadian landscape might be enhanced by knowing about its glacial origins and about the ability of long-ago glaciers to deposit rocks and carve terrain. These explain the scene before us, prompting us to imagine the immense forces that shaped it. This in turn encourages us to entertain certain lines of personification. Again, a hiker or boater assessing Missouri’s Table Rock Lake might be aided by the knowledge that it is a man-made landscape feature, dating back only to 1950s. This knowledge blocks certain lines of thought about the lake’s origin, thereby inviting attribution of unexpected aesthetic properties (misleading, fraudulent, or, perhaps instead, surprising—a marvel). Botanical versions of this last example arise if appreciators view honeysuckle filling a woodland understory, purple loosestrife coloring a wetland, or kudzu overmounting a stand of Georgia pine. Though these plants might seem beautiful— or in the case of kudzu, relentless and domineering—knowledge that these are unwelcome invasive species should temper any overall assessment of the scene. Carlson’s theory invites various lines of criticism. For a start, he does

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not draw a clear boundary between common sense and scientific views. Should our goal be to have our body of contextualizing information increasingly weighted with detailed scientific claims? Would such a trajectory intensify appreciation? It might allow us to notice more detail, be more on the lookout for hidden processes or generating forces not discernible through everyday perception. But Carlson still faces this burden of proof: he must reassure us that the scientific information he urges us to recruit grounds aesthetic, as opposed to simply scientific and/or commonsensical, nature appreciation. That is, he must show why he is offering a formula for aesthetic appreciation rather than one supporting the cultivation of armchair naturalists. I will say a bit more about this below. But another problem soon arises—however we choose to sort science from common sense, appreciation buttressed by false claims seems problematic. Shared commonsense views can be mistaken, and as Thomas Kuhn reminds us, scientific theories are continually challenged. Eventually most prove unsatisfactory and require replacement. So the background information we recruit must be carefully vetted. Lastly, even assuming Carlson is able to satisfy us on these counts, I think his emphasis on scientific background knowledge is more appropriate for large-scale examples— entire landscapes or significant landscape features like a sprawling prairie, the Great Salt Lake, or the Grand Canyon—than for more small-scale or more diffuse phenomena. I suppose botanical knowledge might enhance my appreciation of the first wildflowers in spring; if nothing else, it is satisfying to call them out by name and greet them as returning friends. But I don’t see how an understanding of arcane goings on—the process of photosynthesis in deciduous trees, the decay of leaf-mold into newly rich soil, the inter-relation between apex predator populations and those of their prey— generates aesthetic experience during a walk in the woods. I believe Carlson’s approach is considerably more plausible when the contextualizing knowledge concerns forces that shaped the landscape rather than ongoing processes invisible to the naked eye. Such forces are subject to personification; their action can be characterized by the ascription of the appropriate sorts of aesthetic terms— emotion, behavioral, and evocative (recall Alan Goldman’s eight-part taxonomy discussed in chapter 2).10 Thus the Great Salt Lake seems forbidding, the Mississippi River determined, and Table Rock Lake either remarkable or disquieting, depending on your attitude toward lake origins. Mention of these last possibilities brings to mind one final shortcoming of Carlson’s approach—it is overly weighted in favor of perceptual and cog-

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nitive assessment of our environment. Surely emotional and imaginative responses come into play as well. Two authors who attempt to remedy this situation are Noël Carroll and Emily Brady. In his paper “On Being Moved by Nature,” Carroll argues that a correct account of nature appreciation must make room for more visceral responses to the environment.11 To feel awe in front of a thundering waterfall, comfort in a leafy bower, curiosity before an inviting path, are all, according to Carroll, bona fide examples of nature appreciation. Moreover, Carroll insists there are standards of appropriateness in place for such responses. Despite an association of emotion with irrationality and excess dating back to Plato’s time, there is in fact a logic that governs the ascription of emotional states/application of emotion terms. For example, fear indicates that something poses a threat to us, anger is a response to perceived wrongs, admiration flags the possession of worthy traits of character, hope looks to future gratification. Emotions aroused in response to the veridical perception of such grounding qualities are appropriate, those responding to mistaken perceptions or erroneous assessments are not. In addition, appropriateness requires that the force of an emotion matches the magnitude of the triggering objects or events. Thus, fear of a skittering mouse, outrage over a small slight, panic at the prospect of air travel on a clear, sunny day are all unwarranted. Emotional response to landscape, too, must be correctly calibrated, though we might make allowances for shared cultural myths or misconceptions that ground emotion ascriptions we might reject in different circumstances. Carroll offers his suggestion as a supplement to, rather than a replacement for, Carlson’s account.12 One other counterbalance to Carlson’s predominately cognitive tale concerns imaginative responses to nature. Emily Brady, in her paper “Imagination and the Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature” and follow-up book Aesthetics of the Natural Environment, urges us to acknowledge this dimension of full and proper appreciation. Her proposed taxonomy laying out six different modes of imagining—associative, metaphorical, exploratory, projective, ampliative, and revelatory13—was discussed earlier in chapter 3. Associative imagining, playful and productive, varies with each participant’s experiential stock; metaphorical imagining makes connections that are novel but not arbitrary. The remaining modes are all ways of expanding upon what is given in perception. They create new meanings and aid in the discovery of aesthetic qualities. While imagining certainly seems more free-floating and so less rule-bound than emoting, Brady does exhort us to imagine well. In the case of nature appreciation, imagining well would involve appropriate trains of thought that are

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clear and creative responses to perceived properties of things in the natural world. Recall our acknowledgment in chapter 6 that each art appreciator necessarily brings to bear his or her own set of supporting facts—a comparison class of relevant works, artists, schools, or styles, preferences assembled over time; each encounter is also shaped by the appreciator’s immediate circumstances and state of mind. In her paper “Aesthetic Luck,” discussed in that same chapter, Anna Ribeiro proposed a similar dependence of aesthetic interest on each appreciator’s unique constellation of native (constitutive) and non-native (circumstantial) luck. Our imaginings are similarly shaped by our distinctive backgrounds, preferences, and predilections. But note in closing that while Carroll and Brady both promote non- cognitive modes of nature appreciation, both stop short of claiming “anything goes.” I hope the discussion to date has pointed toward a nuanced yet plausible account of what it is to aesthetically appreciate the natural world. Turn now to the question of whether there is a place for expertise and critical advice to guide novices in this enterprise. Earlier on, I quoted a birdwatching trope that illustrated the salutary effect of art criticism. The suggestion was that following a critic is like going birdwatching with an experienced birder who is willing to share both her vast knowledge and her expensive binoculars. But this very same trope, applied literally, can help us understand how expert advice can aid nature appreciation. If we accept Sibley’s account of aesthetic concepts, taste or discernment is required for their recognition. Thus critics can aid our appreciation of nature by heightening our awareness of the aesthetic qualities on offer.14 We acknowledged in chapter 2 that aesthetic qualities supervene on more basic descriptive/perceptual qualities. So critics can school us in the aesthetic properties of nature by ascribing them outright or by pointing out the non-aesthetic properties on which they depend. As Carlson has argued, experts can draw on both science and common sense to provide contextualizing information. And finally, their remarks can display the feelings properly called forth by natural scenes and the creative trains of imagining they inspire. In his essay “The Art of Seeing Things” the nineteenth-century naturalist John Burroughs urges appreciators to better perceive the natural world, then goes on to recite anecdotes that illustrate his own précising approach to this task.15 For example, he remarks that gray squirrels position their hind legs differently for running up and running down trees and notes that vines differ in their preference for twining clockwise or counterclockwise as they ascend a pole. Burroughs believes that individuals differ vastly in

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their powers of observation and counsels us to be open to both macro- and micro-level features of the natural world: “The book of nature is like a page written over or printed upon with different sized characters and in many different languages. There is coarse print and fine print, there are obscure signs and hieroglyphics . . . only the students and lovers of nature read the fine lines and the footnotes.” 16 Burroughs also suggests that successful nature perception is fueled by love and that observers must be open to seeing anything rather than go out primed for certain targets. Although Burroughs’s essay specifically addresses the sense of sight, he cites examples of our other senses at work registering the coolness of evening air, the rustling of grass, the calls of birds, the fugitive odors. Burroughs’ narratives offer a model for imitation. Beginning appreciators can attempt to recruit their senses in similar fashion. Many, many writers provide similar inspiration. For example, the Romantic poets offered exemplars of impassioned response to landscape. Consider Wordsworth’s paeans to Lake District scenes, or Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight,” “The Aeolian Harp.” And today, The Norton Book of Nature Writing offers excerpts from 131 authors ranging from eighteenth-century naturalist Gilbert White to present- day activist Bill McKibben and contemporary memoirist Janisse Ray.17 Each selection schools readers in what awaits us in the natural environment and what an informed and loving appreciator might make of it. I have been arguing that both artists and naturalists can function as aesthetic tutors by contextualizing environmental features, heightening our awareness of detail in natural scenes, ascribing aesthetic qualities, and modeling acceptable emotional and imaginative response.18 Consider remarks about gloomy moors, solemn glades, uplifting mountain peaks. Such talk became systematized in the eighteenth century when three distinct aesthetic moments—the beautiful, the sublime, and the picturesque— were all considered applicable to the natural world. Tourists were thought to be in need of help in wielding these categories. Sketchpads were the precursors to today’s ubiquitous cameras and iPhones, and travel guides not only counseled appreciators on what to view and what feeling/expressive qualities to look for, but also on how to frame and orient their landscape sketches so as to capture the essence of that scene or feature. Today our connectivity through the electronic world provides immediate access to nature. Those of us with internet access are flooded with words and images that enable vicarious travel. Photographs acquaint us with distant sites, and nature writing can describe, explain, and extol special places. Since

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the natural world is rife with wonders as well as quotidian sources of delight, those promoting nature can operate by highlighting singularities or, alternatively, by documenting typicality. We can contemplate journeying to the more rare and spectacular natural sites while all the while cultivating appreciation of the rewards that everyday nature has on offer. Should there be a summary evaluation component to landscape appreciation? My Facebook feed often contains lists like the following: fifteen jaw- dropping places in Missouri, seven natural wonders of Wisconsin, the twelve most amazing parks in Florida, and more. Of course, it is unclear what standards are in place when such lists are compiled. All the accompanying photos are stunning, but various of us are likely to rank them differently. In the realm of art, appreciation involves not only discerning possessed properties and offering interpretations but also ranking works. The central thesis of Carroll’s On Criticism is the claim that critics are in the business of dispensing reasoned evaluations. Can there be reasoned arguments in support of nature appreciation? What makes for a “good” or “worthy” landscape? Are we obliged to like it? If so, on what grounds? Can we rank natural wonders, or are competing loci of value in the natural world incommensurable? I have maintained throughout this book that there is a justificatory structure to our assessments of art. Despite the widespread differences in taste to which Hume called attention at the start of his Essay, there are objective claims to be made about the properties, aspirations, and achievements of works of art. I believe there are important disanalogies when it comes to nature appreciation. Our ties to landscape are inculcated early. They likely differ from our ties to art in both strength and duration. Many of us may have grown up without having attended a ballet, encountered installation art, taken in a live jazz performance. But inevitably we all grew up in some landscape or other and interacted with it from our earliest years. We can expect that experience to have shaped us, forming ties of comfort and attraction or perhaps fueling dislike and a desire to make a quite different landscape our home. In the end, I believe that many of us form fixed landscape preferences. Unconscious and/or irrational forces may contribute to this interest. Thus our landscape preferences may flow from both hard-wired (phylogenesis) or individually acquired (ontogenesis) associations. Fans of Jay Appleton’s Prospect-Refuge theory might insist that all of us harbor an unconscious preference for the savannah-style landscape where our earliest ancestors flourished. Contrast this with the more personalized preferences for those landscapes in which we each spent our

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formative years. A friend who grew up in coastal Florida was happy only when a sandy beach and palm trees were in sight. Since I grew up walking through New England woods, I find babbling brooks cheery and delightful, the ocean oppressively vast and overwhelming. It is not clear that any standards can be framed requiring us to feel as others do toward nature. It might be incumbent on us as decent humans to feel sympathy when our fellow humans suffer, joy when our friends succeed, and the wide appeal of great works of art can be underscored by what they tell us about human culture or the human condition. Yet it does not seem required that we be moved in any specific way by a vast desert landscape, a minute tidal pool teeming with life, or even a pretty bird on the wing.19 Each and every sort of landscape has its champions. Surely many of us wish we could visit the scenes captured in Eliot Porter’s stunningly beautiful photographs illustrating Sierra Club books and calendars. Yet some individuals raised in Illinois retain a fondness for the unrelievedly flat agricultural landscapes of that region, scenes unlikely ever to grace a Sierra Club calendar page. And some artists and restorers are drawn to polluted brownfield sites, whether to reclaim them for jollier use, or simply because they admire and enjoy the dystopian aesthetic those sites display. If many varieties of landscape have their advocates, some of these individuals can play the role of Humean ideal critics and educate us about the delights available to those who want to view, enter, or enjoy these scenes.

s ome puZZLe s in AppreCiATing LiTerAT ure, fiLm, And ArChiTeCT ure In this section, I will take up some puzzles that arise in the appreciation of three arts: literature, film, and architecture. I class literature and film together as narrative arts; architecture stands alone in its provision of practical affordances in addition to aesthetic delights. I will not be attempting a systematic account of these arts nor of their uptake. Rather, I will be cherry picking, selecting aspects of each art that generate what strike me as particularly interesting appreciative challenges. Literature is an outlier in many respects when it comes to aesthetic theorizing. Problems arise as soon as we try to determine what count as aesthetic qualities in literature and how they are discerned. In many, many arts—painting, sculpture, music, dance, architecture, and more—aesthetic qualities supervene on perceptual qualities and are taken in through the senses of sight and hearing (with the aid of appropriately contextualizing

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background information). This is also the case to some degree with the narrative arts of theatre and film.20 But this paradigm does not apply so comfortably to poetry and literary fiction. Granted, literary works place significant demands on our senses. Rhythm and rhyme in poems is taken in aurally. In addition, aural properties like meter, alliteration, assonance, and onomatopoeia contribute to mood, tone, meaning, and style. The sense of sight comes into play as well. Shaped poems like George Herbert’s “The Altar” and “Easter Wings” from the seventeenth century or E.  E. Cummings’s more playful twentieth-century offerings “l(a” and “r-p- o-p-h- e-s-s-a-g-r” require visual scrutiny, as their arrangement on the page reinforces their meaning.21 And with all poems, visual features like line length, stanza pattern, and the formatting of free verse are aids to understanding and appreciation. Note that many of these factors do not apply to longer prose works. For example, the font employed in my copy of War and Peace is aesthetically irrelevant as are the margins on each page; all that is required is that the right words are presented in the right order. While poets attend to the sounds, rhythms, and even the look of their lines, we do not appreciate poetry based on sensory input alone.22 My remarks to date overlook a crucial component of literary appreciation—the contribution of word meaning. We process word meaning cognitively and exercise imagination to elaborate the results. This applies to all literary genres. It is only through understanding the meaning of a work’s component words that we can acknowledge images, unpack tropes, follow a story line, identify themes, register tone. And with longer works, word meaning is our conduit to relatively abstract features such as traits of character and elements of plot that themselves possess aesthetic qualities. In realizing that a heroine is admirable, a scene suspenseful, or a plot contrived, we are acknowledging “higher-order” properties of literary works. We build on these in formulating interpretations and in justifying summary assessments. Interpretive disagreements at this level feel quite different than the delicate/insipid quarrel we tracked in earlier chapters. An acceptable theory of appreciation should allow that interpretation can be underdetermined by the array of aesthetic qualities in place, much as scientific theories are underdetermined by the empirical features of the world. As a result, more than one interpretation can be plausible. Though this concession falls short of “anything goes!”23 Consider such much- discussed examples as Henry James’s novella The Turn of the Screw, Hemingway’s novel The Sun also Rises, Charlotte Perkins Gilmore’s short story “The Yel-

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low Wallpaper.”24 In each case, incompatible accounts of the characters and their situations can be argued for and buoyed by evidence within the text. In both realms, literature and science, such underdetermination is compatible with realism about the ultimate objects and properties under examination—the physical world in the scientific case, works of art in the aesthetic case. Though note that for many arts, literature among them, works are ontologically classed as abstract rather than concrete entities. Critics can help us by pointing out various of the literary elements mentioned above. Reading and understanding longer prose works can pose quite different challenges than reading and comprehending poetry. Poems can be compressed and hermetic, while novels can be long and sprawling. One can return to a puzzling short poem again and again, making slow progress at deciphering it. But it can take hours and hours to simply read/get through a novel. The experience is inevitably interrupted and resumed; this feature alone makes consumption of this brand of literature quite unlike consumption of the other arts. And while one can take in a novel through reading, technology now offers a new mode of access: the audio book. Many of us listen to audio books while driving, which makes for another differential between this art and many others— our seeming willingness to allot a work of art only part of our attention.25 No matter what audiobooks we select to accompany road trips or daily commutes, great works or mere entertainments, the point just made about elapsed time holds good. It can take many hours to traverse a novel, whatever mode we use to take it in.26 Our initial perusal of a painting or sculpture can be much more rapid, though one clear takeaway from Hume is that even with visual art, informed appreciation requires the return visits and contextualizing urged in his discussion of critical practice and comparison. Return to the challenges of the novel. Full comprehension is taxing, as we must be Janus-faced, both forward- and backward-looking as we progress. We must remember what came before and piece together how it relates to the portion of the narrative we are currently traversing, yet at the same time we must look ahead, consider the expectations we have been invited to form, and assess them in light of what unfolds.27 Thus in processing a story or novel, we must remember how characters are first introduced, note the settings they inhabit, register their moods, beliefs, allegiances, and values, determine their action tendencies, work out the plot entanglements that envelop them, all the while asking how these fit and further the genre to which we assign the containing work. Peter Lamarque

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sets out these and other reader tasks in the chapter entitled “Practice” in his book The Philosophy of Literature (2009). Lamarque’s goal is to characterize a mode of appreciation that is “not unduly recondite or hard to achieve,” one that can be mastered by present- day counterparts of Dr. Johnson’s “common reader.”28 Among the components Lamarque includes in his account are formal analysis (“a heightened analysis of form and structure and the ‘design’ of the whole” [137]), explication (deciphering the meaning of “relatively localized parts” [141]), and interpretation (“a rounded view of a work” that retrieves “aboutness . . . at a thematic level” [148, 150]). Lamarque also lists some more general aspects of appreciating a work as literature. These include expectations of “coherence and inner connectedness”; of “a subject of some interest”; and of “organizing principles or themes that provide unity and value in the work beyond the immediacy of the subject” (137). I’m not convinced we can all accomplish the tasks Lamarque assigns to the common reader entirely on our own. Simply put, tracking the features he mentions—form and structure, organizing principles, local meaning, overarching themes—is hard. Critical input can be invaluable as we attempt these hurdles. That readers must abstract away from the subject of a novel—the fictional world it creates—in order to register other rewarding features generates an appreciative dilemma to which I will return shortly. For now, consider another stumbling block that emerges as we try to take in a literary work. Inevitably, all fictional narratives are in some sense incomplete. 29 Their constitutive descriptions can’t help but be indeterminate to some degree. One way in which paragraphs and pictures—literature and the visual arts— differ lies in the fact that pictures are what Nelson Goodman called replete. They can provide a full rendition of the appearance of a character or scene at a given time while an author must of necessity be selective. Granted, in Book X of The Republic Plato disparages the visual arts for presenting a mere semblance of the visual world. He complains that painters can only capture a moment in time of the ever- changing flux of sensory experience. Moreover, analytical cubism aside, painters can only show the appearance of things from some one fixed point of view. Yet the overall difference between these arts persists. While literary description is not similarly confined to one perspectival point of view, its inability to fully capture this world or fully create another is beyond question. Consider trying to convey the look of one wall of the room you currently inhabit, first through a painting, drawing, or photograph, then through a description. Philosophers exploring the powers of narrative challenge us to say whether

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Sherlock Holmes has a mole on his back or list all he ate for breakfast on a specific day at 221 Baker Street.30 There will always be myriad unanswerable questions about any fictional world. Our task as readers is to fill in at least some of them as we proceed. One might claim that literature triumphs when it comes to depicting the inner lives of characters—their thoughts and fears, their motivations, their inter-relations, and more. Authors have the choice of different points of view as they tell their tales and can spring back and forth to reveal the thoughts and feelings of different characters.31 But clearly, no character’s inner life can be fully documented. It remains the case that fictional worlds are underdetermined by the authors writing them into existence. Those of us reading or listening to literary fictions are tasked with filling out in our imagination the characters and settings described and positing causal links that support the narrative arc. Philosophers of art have acknowledged this aspect of literary appreciation in their theories. Thus Kendall Walton deems works of art props for games of make-believe, and Kathleen Stock defends a view— extreme intentionalism—that defines fictional content as whatever an author intends readers to imagine.32 Filmgoers often complain when a director’s adaptation of a favorite novel or story does not match the way they imaginatively fleshed out the work on first reading. This indicates the role played by such imaginative work. In chapter 3 when I proposed adding emotional responsiveness and imaginative fluency to the traits required of Humean ideal critics, I introduced Emily Brady’s suggested division of imagining into six separate modes. Her exhortation to imagine well-introduced normative concerns, but I don’t think clear criteria for sorting acceptable from unacceptable imaginative responses emerge from her discussion. The present application— determining what trains of imagining are correct responses to any given literary work—seems similarly unresolved. Some imaginative elaborations of a literary text can be justified by pointing to the cues that prompted them and the grounds— contextual, historical, cultural, artistic, and more—that show why they flow from the originating text. Others can be critiqued as personal, idiosyncratic, strident, unmoored. But such judgments will have to be decided on a case by case basis. The situation seems much like that involved in judging competing interpretations. Some interpretations are nonstarters, others less well grounded in the text than their competitors. While we also lack algorithms for assessing imaginings, we can come up with reasons for rejecting those that seem inappropriate, at odds with the passages that have prompted them.

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Critics can help us perform many of the appreciative tasks discussed above by modeling successful performance in their writings. But recall my earlier remarks about varied uses of criticism. We look to critics to provide different sorts of aid depending on when we seek them out. If we consult a critic before choosing a novel to read, we look for a sense of the fictional world we will enter, the imaginative fill we will have to provide, the rewards we are likely to reap (why should we take on the 1,000+ pages of Infinite Jest?). If we instead turn to critics to deepen our understanding of works we have already traversed, we are more likely to be interested in debates about meaning than seeking help with mandated imagining. In such cases we look to a critic to advise us on the significance of Gregor Samsa’s transformation in Metamorphosis, on the requisites of suitable marriage for the heroines of Jane Austen or Elizabeth Gaskell, on the reason Orhan Pamuk inserted himself by name in the concluding segment of his novel The Museum of Innocence, and more. In addition to robustly imagining the fictional world presented by a given work of literature and theorizing about the meanings conveyed, readers (and listeners) who want to appreciate a short story or novel as a work of art must also ponder how it works its effects on us. This task requires redirecting attention away from what the assembled words signify. That is, readers must avoid total immersion in the world of the work and instead attend to such matters as plot structure, character development, narrative presentation, and literary style. This multitasking constitutes the appreciative dilemma I mentioned above. Consider an example. In her article “Style and Personality in the Literary Work,” Jenefer Robinson characterizes the style of Henry James in The Ambassadors in terms of his frequent use of negatives, abstract nouns, non-transitive verbs, and elegant variation and goes on to suggest that these are elements of James’s style “because they all contribute to the expression of his personality and attitudes”; allowing him to describe Strether’s state of mind “in a particular judicious, abstractive, expository way. . . . [James] thereby expresses his own ‘subjective and abstractive tendency’ [and] his interest in the relations between minds (Strether’s, the narrator’s, the reader’s).”33 Reading Henry James is perhaps an acquired taste; knowing something about his distinctive style helps explain what is unique and (to some) appealing about the experience.34 Consider what appreciators must do to make a stylistic assessment of The Ambassadors. They must leave the fictionalized realm, turn-of-the- century New England and Paris, and focus instead on the vocabulary and sentence construction used by James in creating

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that world. Though this attentional shift is necessary to register the stylistic traits Robinson lays out, it is also taxing. In fact, some literary scholars today resort to computer analysis, textual crunching that eventuates in a detailed statistical read- out of a given author’s choice of words and structures, in order to perform one part of this bifurcated task. As ordinary readers, should we devote our entire attention to the world of the work, or should some of our investigative powers address the means the author has used to usher us into that world and hold our attention once there? Which choice makes for the most rewarding aesthetic experience? This dilemma recurs with other arts as well. I believe the issue becomes particularly pointed in Noël Carroll’s paper “The Power of Movies.”35 Let us change examples and continue our pursuit of this appreciative dilemma as it applies to the art of film. In the paper just mentioned Carroll argues that mainstream movies are especially powerful and approachable because of three key traits: (1) such movies recruit the perceptual machinery already in place for negotiating our interactions with the real world; (2) moviemakers avail themselves of a set of editing devices unique to their art—scaling, bracketing, and indexing—that enable them to direct viewer’s attention in ways not open to other arts; and (3) moviemakers pique and retain appreciators’ interest by structuring their works around an erotetic (question and answer) narrative structure. I find Carroll’s account of the first two points utterly persuasive. The degree to which films capture our curiosity by raising, then answering, a set of gripping questions seems a little less clear. But admittedly, movies that don’t prompt us to wonder anything at all about the characters, settings, and situations to which we are introduced seem to be works that have failed to captivate us, and thus, for us, failed works. The question I address here is whether we do best/ are best rewarded by viewing films with divided attention, registering the goings on in the fictional world but also ascending to ask how its creators have employed the three traits Carroll singles out to establish that world and maintain our engagement with it. I purposefully used the term “creators” in the plural just now. And this flags one unique property of film. The locus of creativity is extraordinarily dispersed in this art. More often than not, it includes not only the actors, actresses, and director, but also the script authors, cinematographer, assistants responsible for locations, props, costumes, as well as those providing technical support—for example, CGI or other special effects (consider the techniques behind Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs). Each element I have listed points to features we might register in a complete appreciation of a

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given film. In her primer Aesthetics and Film, Katherine Thomson-Jones offers an account of film appreciation consilient with what we have said about literary appreciation.36 She suggests that the experience of watching a film is facilitated by our performing a large number of complex cognitive activities . . . we have to figure out what’s going on in the story. This . . . requires us to perceive movement, recognize what is being depicted on the screen, interpret characters’ behaviour, make causal connections and more generally fill gaps in the narrative, form expectations about what will happen next, and keep track of spatial and temporal configurations within the film’s fictional world. . . . After we have left the cinema or turned off the television, we may start wondering about the film’s deeper meaning, its themes, moral, or message—for example, what the film tells us about life and death, love, power, sexuality, or even the nature of film itself. (Thomson-Jones, 87) While Thomson-Jones presents questions about meaning as points we ponder after exiting the theater, I suspect a good deal of questioning goes on as the film unfolds. Again, it is this process that seems to call for multitasking on our part, a split between rapt attention to—and, on some accounts, construction of—the world of the work, on the one hand, and more “meta-level” interest in how the director, cinematographer, editor, actors, etc., etc. have enabled/invited us to engage with that world. Return to Carroll’s simple three-part division of the attentioncontrolling devices available to filmmakers: scaling, bracketing, and indexing. These options open to all camera- operators are so common that they shape the schlockiest TV shows in addition to arthouse films. In any scene from NCIS presenting a conversation among several characters, the camera cuts back and forth in a way that focuses our attention on each speaker. And when the episode shifts to portentous action sequences, scaling, bracketing, and indexing help construct the montage that keeps us aware of, say, the furtive bomber, the vulnerable and unaware crowd, and our NCIS heroes acting to thwart the terrorist plot. It is second nature to us to take in or “read” the goings-on. We don’t need to be schooled in the history of film and study excerpts from Battleship Potemkin to understand and process the workings of montage. But surely full appreciation of a film should involve knowledge of these taken-for-granted resources of the art

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of film as well as notice of when they are especially effective, or embellished, or put to innovative purpose. I have been suggesting that this sort of multitasking is a necessary part of full appreciation of any film. The difficulties this entails are underlined when we consider the incredibly complex plots of many present-day movies. Kurosawa’s Rashomon is a classic reminder that point of view is variable, narrator reliability elusive. Simply following the plot of such recent popular hits as the Wachowskis’ The Matrix, Christopher Nolan’s Inception, or Terence Malick’s The Tree of Life presents a major challenge. So how are we to manage filling in these contours while also making the meta-level observations that contribute to the other sorts of assessment under consideration here? Film buffs can look to criticism for help with both tasks. Film critics have presumably amassed countless hours watching, judging, and comparing films. They fulfill the requisites for Humean practice and comparison regarding film art, and this in turn positions them to fill in plot details we’ve missed but also to flag when aspects of a particular film are noteworthy—when film-makers use allusion to pay homage to previous films or directors, or alternatively, when certain features are derivative and thus detrimental to a film’s overall value. Critics can also school us in what Thomson-Jones called a film’s “deeper meaning,” helping us to see the significance of puzzling parts as well as the “big picture” to which they supposedly add up. In addition to calling attention to the complicated nature of movies compared with other arts (paradoxically, this co- exists with their greater degree of accessibility as theorized by Noël Carroll), I’d like to mention one other puzzling feature—repeatability. Interesting ontological issues are raised by the film industry’s propensity for remakes and adaptations, but what I have in mind is our propensity as viewers to re-see favorite movies. Especially when these are thrillers or have some elements of fright or suspense, it is challenging to understand how such return visits are rewarding. I am not claiming that this is an aspect of movie watching that prompts us to seek help from critics. Rather, understanding this phenomenon might help us build an account of just what full appreciation of a film consists in. And this in turn could flag points where critical aid or input could be of use. Perhaps one line of entrée is to consider the familiar demands of very young children that their parents reread again and again their favorite books. This phenomenon occurs with children who are too young to read

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themselves but are fully capable of memorizing stories repeatedly read to them by others. There is clearly some pleasure in the familiarity with a tale, with “owning it” as it unfurls each time. The sense of predictability and mastery seems to outweigh any falling off or disappointment from the fact that no part of the narrative can any more surprise. Presumably children anticipate and react to what they know is to come. In all likelihood adult moviegoers do something similar when rewatching favorite films. Though they know how the plot will unfold, in their imagination they watch as if for the first time. Here is a place where aestheticians and cognitive scientists can fruitfully team up to tell us more about just how we process—and derive pleasure from—film narratives. Murray Smith’s recent book Film, Art and the Third Culture: A Naturalized Aesthetics of Film (2017) is an attempt at just this sort of rapprochement, as he frames his entire discussion of film ontology and film appreciation in terms of C. P. Snow’s 1959 posit of two cultures, one scientific, the other humanistic. Smith’s naturalized aesthetics of film strives to bring the findings of cognitive science to bear on an account of the resources we recruit in watching a film. Such a tale would apply to ideal critics as well as to the appreciators they advise. I will be brief in discussing my final example—architecture. Some but not all buildings are works of art. Unless one holds very strict views on site specificity, architecture can be a multiple art, as the same design or blueprint can be realized in different locales. (Cf. Levittown, the first example of repeated tract housing.) But generally works of art that strike us as worthy of art status are one- off affairs. Buildings stand apart from most other works of art in that they were generally created to fulfill specific functions—home, school, church, hospital, theater, bank, factory, sports stadium, ice-hockey rink. Even garden follies are in place for a reason. Architectural theorists debate whether a building’s intended function should be visible on its face. The saying “Form follows function,” coined by Louis Sullivan in the early twentieth century, has framed debates about modernism and architectural aesthetics. So my first question about architectural appreciation is this: in what relation must an appreciator stand to a building’s intended function? In her paper “On Being Moved by Architecture,” Jenefer Robinson takes issue with those who think visual appreciation suffices for this art.37 She follows theorist Juhani Pallasmaa in dismissing all such ocularcentric views. Pallasmaa advocates a “body-centered and integrated experience of the world” (337). Robinson opens her paper by quoting a passage in which he admitted feeling compelled to kneel and put his tongue on the

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cool marble threshold of a Greene and Greene Craftsman-style California bungalow. Robinson’s goal is to take Pallasmaa’s point that our appreciation of architecture must be multi-sensory and go him one better, claiming that we must not only move through buildings but emotionally respond to the affordances they offer.38 In one telling example, she describes the claustrophobic feeling intentionally created by Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin, a feeling that makes us feel for and empathize with the victims it memorializes. But I want to float an even more challenging version of Robinson’s suggestion. If architectural works serve practical purposes, then perhaps we can only appreciate them properly when we attempt to discharge those purposes within them. In fact Robinson comes close to endorsing this more extreme version of her view in the following passage: To appreciate a work of architecture fully requires not only grasping the structure of a building but also interacting with it, moving through and around it, feeling what it is like to live or work or act in it, to follow its paths, enter its doors, move over its thresholds, pass along its corridors, look out of its windows, and work or play or walk about in its rooms. It is not enough to see or figure out what the building exemplifies or expresses; one has to engage one’s whole body in the process of understanding and appreciation. (340) Thus I should live in a house, withdraw money from a bank, worship in a church, assemble something in a factory, look to the west from the top of St. Louis’s Gateway Arch, skate around Yale University’s ice rink, in order to not only sense but also proprioceptively feel, cognitively acknowledge, and practically discharge the purposes for which these structures were designed. One consequence of the view under consideration is that I never properly appreciated the great architectural masterpieces featured in my undergraduate survey course in art history, as I only viewed photographs of the Parthenon, the Colosseum, Chartres, and more. One might object that present-day technology can remedy this problem. Programs realtors use to offer walk-throughs of houses they have listed could be adapted to allow appreciators a virtual walk-through of any structure, including both past buildings that have been destroyed and future buildings that have not yet been constructed. But as Robinson points out, this remains an ocularcentric experience. Such programs allow us to see what it would be like to

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walk through a house. But we are not granted multisensory access by such tours. We don’t hear clicking as we cross the entrance hall tiles, smell the aroma of freshly baked cookies as we pass through the kitchen, feel the plush softness as we ascend the carpeted stairs. I believe my initial suggestion—that to fully appreciate an architectural work one must not only enter and move through it but also discharge its intended function—sets the bar too high. We cannot be expected to worship in Hagia Sophia, watch spectacles in the Coliseum, execute trades in the New York Stock Exchange, entertain friends in the Villa Savoye. But, importantly, we can virtually perform these tasks by exercising our imagination as we enter and move through these structures. And in fact, if our imagination is sufficiently rich and agile, these experiences might be triggered by visual cues alone—photographs or online tours of the buildings in question. Without taking intended function into account, we do not appreciate a building or edifice as a full or living work. And even when buildings from the past no longer fulfill those initially intended functions, consideration of their suitability for those tasks is surely part of a full assessment. Though of course when buildings are repurposed—a warehouse becomes high-end lofts, a bank becomes a restaurant—then our judgement should switch to how well they acquit themselves with regard to the newly imposed use, with that sitting palimpsest-style over the previous function. Critics can help us here by informing us about architectural history and style, historical trends and movements, the suitability of specific buildings to their intended purposes, changes wrought to those buildings over time. The thick Michelin guidebooks that lead many travelers through the capitals of Europe surely attempt just this. The art of architecture is unique in one other respect that can create appreciative hurdles. I have in mind the practice of one architect altering or adding to the work of a predecessor. This is a common feature of architectural improvement. It is necessitated when the original designer of a given building is no longer living, but it is also frequently the case that a different architect is awarded the commission of altering or enhancing the work of a peer. Note how shocking we would find it were this practice extended to the other arts. Imagine that the possessor of a Rembrandt painting, finding the right foreground a bit empty, hired a contemporary painter to add in some additional figures, or an appreciator hiring a poet to “un- obfuscate” Marianne Moore’s famous poem on poetry. I can think of a few occasions that approximate the phenomenon I’m considering—the push to add fig

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leaves and other modesty-preserving appurtenances to ancient sculpture, or variants rung on a well-known ballet—though this last may be due to the somewhat porous nature of work identity in this realm, the result of complex but imperfect notational systems as well as the practice of dancers tutoring their successors in roles they have relinquished. New screenwriters, directors, even new actors, are often hired to change or improve the course of a given film, but this would not parallel the phenomenon under discussion unless these alterations were done post-production and thus changed a finished film. I don’t believe this is ever the case. And while unfinished musical works have been completed by other composers, unfinished literary works completed by later writers, these changes were necessitated by a different set of exigencies.39 The philosopher Larry Shiner based his paper “Architecture vs. Art: The Aesthetics of Art Museums” (Contemporary Aesthetics 2007) on the fact that one of the most prestigious commissions for which contemporary architects vie is designing a new art museum or an addition to an existing one. Judging such endeavors requires identifying each museum’s primary function—housing a permanent collection? If so, of what nature? Housing a changing array of temporary exhibitions?—and determining how well that function is shown forth and supported by the building’s design. This broader category encompasses my special interest here, namely, how do museum additions relate to the buildings they enhance? Do they complement them, present stylistic or structural echoes to unify the whole, or instead offer up a significant contrast that calls attention to both the new and old portions of the ensemble? The difficulty of adding on to an art museum already considered iconic is exemplified by the long and ultimately fruitless struggle to commission an addition to Marcel Breuer’s Whitney Museum on Manhattan’s upper east side.40 But buildings intended to house art also present a special challenge. Because they will exist in the rarified artworld, they aspire to “make a splash.” Yet they cannot, or at least should not, upstage the works of art they are meant to house. To explore these issues, Shiner took a tour of many museums and museum additions and reported on how well they met these demands. He cites one clear failure: Daniel Libeskind’s Denver Art Museum addition that opened in 2006. Quoting from Shiner’s critique: Libeskind is proud of the fact that there are hardly any vertical or horizontal lines on the outside of his building, but he has unfortunately

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followed the same logic on the inside so that almost every wall leans— sometimes vertiginously— outward or inward with many rooms in odd, trapezoidal shapes, sometimes narrowing to a point in the corners. As a result, exhibition designers and curators have faced a tremendous challenge. Occasionally, a funky piece of contemporary sculpture or a media installation seems to like this crazy quilt environment that never stops grabbing for attention, but more conventional works, especially paintings, are either overwhelmed or else one is distracted by the braces that are used to hold them vertical. Moreover, there are several areas where large expanses of wall slope so acutely that they have simply been left disconcertingly blank. As we have seen with other arts, critics can aid our appreciation by putting works into their proper art-historical context. I believe Shiner in this paper plays the role of an architectural ideal critic. His insightful account of each of the museums or museum additions he visits explains how and why it is stylistically distinctive, situates it in the history of contemporary architecture, discusses its relation to its surrounding cityscape, weighs its effectiveness for housing and showcasing art, and offers an overall assessment of its architectural merit. All this is framed against his opening discussion of the evolution of art museums that sets out the ramifying set of tasks they have taken on. Shiner closes his paper with the hope that some museums can “serve the art they contain while also being outstanding examples of architectural art.” I believe appreciators who visit any of these eight museums with Shiner’s account in hand, or who consult it after the fact, will have an enhanced experience. They will emerge with a deepened understanding of the particular building they have entered as well as of the genre (art museum) to which it belongs.

CriTiCism And iden TiT y p oLiTiC s In this segment I examine some of the interconnections between art criticism and identity politics. Identity comes into play in many aspects of our culture. Most of us simultaneously identify with many different and overlapping groups, defined by age, race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion, political affiliation, workplace, neighborhood, and more. We can debate the pull of such identifications as well as the nature of their social construction. My concern here has to do with prohibitions concerning who gets to reference, explore, or appropriate aspects of these iden-

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tities. Identity politics arise when members of a group are singled out or criticized or when someone reaches across group boundaries and makes use of what may well be proprietary material. Who, if anyone, can tell an anti-semitic joke, use racial slurs, call out a woman for being fat? Permission often depends on the agent’s identity. Societal distribution of power can also determine which intra-group practices and behaviors can be exported. If we think our society is racist, sexist, classist, ageist, or intolerant in various other ways, then it can seem particularly offensive when those in more powerful groups take advantage of, impugn, or presume to know or speak for those in less powerful groups. In the realm of art, infractions tend to involve appropriation of another group’s or another culture’s content or practice. Can a white artist create a work about blackness? Can a male comic tell a joke about lesbians? Can a cis actor play a trans role? Can an able-bodied dancer perform as disabled? Returning to the topic of criticism, can a white critic judge a black artist’s work? There have been real-life conflicts around each of these issues, except, perhaps, the last. Regarding artistic content, consider the controversy that broke out over the white artist Dana Schutz’s painting of Emmett Till lying in his coffin. Schutz’s painting, titled “Open Casket,” was part of the Whitney Biennial for the year 2017. In any open letter to the Whitney, the artist Hannah Black demanded that the painting be not only removed from the show but destroyed on the grounds that Schutz had no right to depict black suffering. Here are three short excerpts from Black’s letter: It is not acceptable for a white person to transmute Black suffering into profit and fun, though the practice has been normalized for a long time. . . . Through his mother’s courage, Till was made available to Black people as an inspiration and warning. Non-Black people must accept that they will never embody and cannot understand this gesture. Ongoing debates on the appropriation of Black culture by non-Black artists have highlighted the relation of these appropriations to the systematic oppression of Black communities in the US and worldwide.41 In his paper on jokes (discussed briefly in the Introduction), Ted Cohen divides jokes into those that are pure, requiring no prior knowledge or particular attitude on the part of listeners, and those that are hermetic or affective, requiring either special knowledge or shared animus. Cohen then briefly discusses why it can be disfiguring for women to listen to and laugh

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at sexist jokes. Acknowledging that there are such shared prohibitions, Seth Meyers, the host of Late Night on NBC, has instituted a segment titled “Jokes Seth Can’t Tell.” He has two of the show’s writers, Amber Ruffin who is black and Jenny Hagel who is lesbian, sit alongside him. Meyers then delivers the lead-ins to a set of jokes about race or about sexual orientation; Amber and Jenny deliver the punch lines. Each night toward the end of the routine, Meyers’ partners encourage him to tell a racist or homophobic joke in its entirety; the pair then explode in mock outrage and recrimination. For our sensitivity around casting in film and theater, consider the recent news that Scarlett Johansson has relinquished her role in the movie Rub and Tug after public outcry from the transgender community. Johansson had been cast as Dante “Tex” Gill, a prostitution ring leader who was born a woman (assigned female at birth) but identified as a man.42 Note that Johansson’s response represents a relatively new trend, as Jeffrey Tambor received accolades for his starring role as transgender woman Maura Pfefferman in the award-winning Amazon Studios series Transparent, and both Eddie Redmayne and Jared Leto won critical acclaim for their portrayals of transgender characters (one based on real life) in The Danish Girl and The Dallas Buyer’s Club.43 Washington Post author Travis M. Andrews summarizes this sea change as follows: Only four years ago, the press stumbled over itself declaring Jeffrey Tambor brave and courageous for portraying a transgender woman in Jill Soloway’s Transparent. Less than 1,500 days later, the Internet erupted in such outrage when Johansson took on the role of Dante “Tex” Gill, a transgender man who ran a Pittsburgh massage parlor and prostitution business in the 1970s and ’80s, that she dropped the role.44 A similar pattern can be found with regard to the casting of disabled or differently abled characters. The aforementioned Eddie Redmayne also starred in the role of Stephen Hawking in the film The Theory of Everything. Andrews also mentions Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson playing an amputee in the film Skyscraper and Joaquin Phoenix playing a real-life writer who was paralyzed below the waist in Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot. James Young is one philosopher who has examined this issue, publishing both papers and a follow-up book on the topic of cultural appropriation.45 He recognizes three different types of appropriation— of subject, of

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content, and of object. Young rarely finds appropriation worthy of censure, in part because he values self-realization and freedom of expression on the part of artists, also because he often finds redeeming social value in cases others might reject. I propose to address this balance sheet, considering the possible harm done when artists— or critics— descend to cross protective boundaries of power and privilege. Young condemns appropriation in one specific context—when it distorts a culture in a way that insiders can reasonably find offensive. The case I want to examine here concerns the first of Young’s three categories, subject appropriation. He defines this variety as follows: “Subject appropriation occurs when an outsider represents members or aspects of another culture. This sort of appropriation would occur when an outsider makes the culture or lives of insiders the subject of a painting, story, film, or other work of art” (PO, p. 136). Here is the question I want to ask about subject appropriation as applied to critical tasks: can critics properly cross the sorts of identity boundaries under discussion and assess works by artists who clearly dwell in or identify with groups to which those critics do not belong? Dana Schutz was savaged for presuming to take on a subject involving black experience. Can a white heterosexual relatively affluent male critic presume to judge works by black, or gay, or female, or poor artists? If those works are steeped in the lived experience of those groups, how can the critic hope to penetrate and understand those creative origins? Just as we seemed to need a full-blown account of imagination to solve some of the puzzles posed above, we seem to need equally robust accounts of personal identity and of the knowledge of other minds to solve the present puzzle. In what follows I will concentrate on our knowledge of other minds. Today this age- old problem has been recast as the problem of mind-reading—understanding the thoughts and feelings of our conspecifics. There are competing explanations of this capacity, with the so- called theory-theory and simulation theory representing the two poles and various hybrid proposals filling in the middle ground. Whichever approach wins out and provides the best account of how we understand others, these two challenges remain for the realm of art and for our particular concern, critical practice: can critics put themselves in others’ minds, and if they can, should they cross barriers of power and privilege in doing so? Taking on the question of what is possible requires considering the mechanisms of understanding, empathy, and projection; taking on the question of what is permissible requires acknowledging the deep imbalances of power that characterize US culture and most western societies. These are large and

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important topics; I can’t hope to resolve them satisfactorily here. I will, however, try to set the stage so that the parameters of the issue become clear and we can more adequately formulate appropriate critical assignments. The Suitability Requirement proposed in Chapter Five addressed the fit of critics to the works they judged in a narrow sense, one determined by critics’ relation to work types. The present concern is broader, encompassing all the cultural factors that generate identities artists and critics can claim. In terms of the mindreading task at issue here, similar capacities would seem to underlie both artistic creation and critical assessment. We should marvel that artists can realize and critics understand characters and situations that lie across the cultural divides under consideration. Such accomplishments would count as instances of what Young calls subject appropriation. To see whether and how such artistic and critical acts proceed, we need a broad understanding of mindreading. Shaun Nichols and Stephen Stich taxonomize competing accounts in their book of that title.46 To appreciate the range of cases that these theories aspire to handle, consider mindreading across this continuum: ordinary children’s acquisition of this ability, the perhaps stunted acquisition by autistic children, the everyday garden-variety understanding we have of friends, acquaintances, peers, and on, our understanding of actual people who are quite unlike us, and, finally, our understanding of fictional characters and situations. If similar mechanisms underlie each step in the continuum, then no special theory is needed to explain the possibility of critical practice. That said, the very same barriers might be in place regarding actual individuals’ understanding of people from different communities, cultures, classes, and so on, artists’ ability to create characters and situations that lie across these divides, and critics’ ability to fully and fairly assess fictions that are remote from them in these ways. The theory presented by Nichols and Stich offers a useful entry point for our discussion. I will pause to present their view in some detail as I believe a piece of their proposed machinery shows just where and why our understanding of others might be limited. As a result, answers to our opening questions about boundary crossing can be read off from their theory. Readers impatient with the technical details can skip ahead to the discussion of The Help at the end of this section, where I attempt to apply the insights gleaned from Nichols and Stich’s proposal, supplemented by additions from two other authors, Heidi Maibom and Suzanne Keen. Nichols and Stich’s homuncular functionalist account of mind reading

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posits a variety of subsystems individuated by the cognitive function each performs. Illustrative diagrams feature complex flow charts with labelled boxes flagging each of the component functions; interconnecting arrows indicate how content flows among and between them.47 Inspection of the resulting “boxology” yields answers to the questions posed above. Nichols and Stich note one important caveat: “Positing a ‘box’ which represents a functionally characterized processing mechanism or a functionally characterized set of mental states does not commit a theorist to the claim that the mechanism or the states are spatially localized in the brain any more than drawing a box in a flow chart for a computer program commits one to the claim that the operation that the box represents is spatially localized in the computer” (11).48 The aspect of Nichols and Stich’s theory that I find most illuminating for philosophy of art is their inclusion of what they call a Possible Worlds Box or PWB. This box accommodates a special subset of each individual’s beliefs and desires, those that aren’t endorsed or taken to be true. The PWB contents will include the results of hypothetical reasoning, counterfactual supposition, and pretense—both individual forays and those conducted by a group. But most important for our concerns, I believe the PWB also houses fiction ranging across the arts including not only literary narratives but also poems, films, representational paintings, sculptures, and more.49 Simulationists employ a computer trope claiming that we put various of our mental states and processes offline in reading the minds of others.50 Presumably this also applies to our understanding of fiction, broadly conceived. Nichols and Stich employ a complementary trope when they note that the contents of the PWB are “cognitively quarantined,” that is, they don’t flow into the belief box nor do they serve to generate real-world (as opposed to make-believe) actions. Consider a continuum of examples setting out our understanding of real and fictional people and events. Suppose first that we ascribe a psychological state to a friend: Jill believes my Airedale is lying on the couch. This paradigm case of mind-reading attributes a straightforward perceptual belief, though note that even here we presume that Jill knows what an Airedale is, what a couch is, and so on.51 Mind reading can also track nonexistent states of affairs, for example, when others employ hypothetical reasoning in thinking about the future or counterfactual reasoning in wishing things were otherwise. If Jill’s remarks lead us to conclude she believes that the Democrats will retake the Senate in 2020, our mind reading links a real person and a possible real-world event. Nichols and Stich’s theory

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would place the result in our belief box, not our PWB. But we are getting closer to possibilia; if we simply entertain the proposition we have ascribed to Jill, that is, if we in 2019 entertain the thought ‘the Democrats retake the Senate in 2020,’ we are visiting our PWB. Finally, consider fictional content. If we are members of Jill’s book club and attend a discussion of Pride and Prejudice, we can determine Jill’s beliefs about Elizabeth and Darcy. Ascriptions of her views about the novel would be handled much like ascriptions of her views about future elections. But mindreading directed not at Jill but at characters in the fiction—for example, claims about Darcy’s preferences, attitudes, beliefs—would land differently in Nichols and Stich’s boxology. Though based on supporting evidence from within the narrative, such claims would reside in our PWB rather than in our box containing beliefs about the real world. The same would be true of beliefs we formed about any other details of the fictional world. These too would be housed in our PWB since they do not track actual states of affairs. Once an item has entered the PWB, Nichols and Stich offer a crucial hypothesis about how it can be supplemented, embellished, etc. They propose that any initial fictional or counterfactual claim placed in the PWB is “clamped,” which means it is retained as a supposition even though the claim is literally false (32). All our existing beliefs compatible with the claim are then imported into the PWB to supplement the account. This task is accomplished by what Nichols and Stich label the Updater, a subsystem of the Inference box. Note how this process formalizes what was said in the previous section about our clear need to flesh out the inevitably indeterminate aspects of a fictional world. Knowing that Sherlock Holmes lives at 221B Baker Street, we also assume (believe) that he inhabits an English city, that he has a tailor, that he breathes relatively polluted air. These additions emerge from the Updater. But note how this portion of Nichols and Stich’s flow chart imposes a crucial constraint on our understanding of fiction—we can only fill gaps by importing our existing cognitive stock. In sum, the account of mindreading just sketched delivers an answer to our possibility dilemma regarding critical expertise. The hypotheses and machinery proposed by Nichols and Stich show the cognitive capacities recruited in our attempts to understand others, both actual and fictional. Thus their boxology models the process critics would engage in attempting to plumb the minds of authors and their fictional creations. Turn now to our second dilemma, that concerning propriety. Are attempts at understanding thwarted or compromised when we try to cross the sorts of barriers—race, class, ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion, and more—

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that flag privilege and constitute identity politics? This question applies equally to the mind-reading tasks of artists as they create, audiences as they appreciate, and critics as they assess. Their efforts would be similarly diagrammed by the Nichols and Stich boxology. At issue is whether at any of the stages involved in creating, appreciating, or assessing works of art, agents can fully and fairly understand the experiences of those who dwell in different cultures, identify with different groups, enjoy different shares of social and economic opportunity. Nichols and Stich’s account shows just where the difficulty lies here. Since we can only supplement the fictional propositions we entertain by importing our existing beliefs and using the inference methods we currently employ, we are trapped in a bubble. We can never get beyond our own privilege and presuppositions. It would seem to follow that we can never fully grasp the experience of others situated differently than us. Does this skeptical claim go too far? If it results in a slippery slope argument alienating us from any and all others, this would be excessive. The common-sense received view of our shared human condition doesn’t place us in solipsistic bubbles, each constituting a lonely community of one. Any argument yielding this conclusion could be attacked by setting up a reductio.52 A simple version of such a rejoinder, one challenging the claimed impossibility of mindreading, would go something like this: 1. Assume we can never get out of ourselves, shed our own privilege and presuppositions, when trying to understand another. 2. It would follow that we are always and inevitably alienated from our fellows. 3. But we do indeed believe we can know others at least to some degree. 4. So the initial assumption must be rejected. One way to honor the initial premise while rejecting the skeptical conclusion is to assume that mindreading and understanding can be matters of degree. I will take that approach in what follows. Attempting to cross species boundaries would of course be the most extreme example of a limiting case here. The philosopher Thomas Nagel assessed this difficulty in his famed paper “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” which probed the nature of consciousness.53 He invited us to imagine what it might be like to be a bat and suggested we could never capture just what it would feel like to be a creature flapping its webbed wings, navigating with echo-location, eating insects, and snoozing upside- down in an attic.

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Rather, we would only succeed in tracking human attempts at these activities: “In so far as I can imagine this (which is not very far) it tells me only what it would be like for me to behave as a bat behaves. But that is not the question. I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat” (p. 3 of 9 on web version). At issue is whether we are similarly stymied in trying to read the minds of our fellow humans, both actual and fictional, when attempting to understand, speak for, or borrow from, those with less social prestige and power. Let me draw from two additional authors in addressing this challenge. Heidi Mabom, in a forthcoming book, reconstrues mind reading, our attempt to understand others, as perspective-taking. In a discussion nicely framed with references to Shakespeare, Borges, and Descartes, she indicates the constraints that shape any attempt to take on another’s perspective.54 If we envision a continuum between self and other, she argues that successful mindreading necessarily inhabits the middle of the span. We need to retain enough of ourselves that we are the ones being informed, yet we need to take on enough of the other’s point of view that we can get at least some glimmerings of his or her quite different take on the world. As Maibom states this challenge, “We must understand others from our standpoint, while moving some distance from ourselves and toward them, but without thereby engaging in more radical self-transformation” (23). This picture of the task suggests that there can be degrees of mind reading. I believe Maibom’s account is compatible with, in fact illuminated by, the theory proposed by Nichols and Stich. They hypothesize the functions at the sub-personal level required to explain mind-reading, while she informs us of the identities at the personal level that must be acknowledged and maintained. Individuals trying to understand another land differently along the continuum just sketched depending on whether they fill in the PWB box with more of their own beliefs or populate it with more “foreign” beliefs correctly ascribed to the other. That continuum has as its two endpoints the identity of the two persons at issue—the mind-reading agent and her target. The target can be a fictional being, and within a fiction, one character can attempt to understand another. The only iteration that cannot obtain is the case where a fictional being tries to understand an actual person. Though even this claim calls for some qualification. There are many instances where actual individuals are featured in fiction. I might write a novel where a character ponders President Trump. But I’m not sure this should count as a fictional entity reading the mind of an actual person, as the version of Donald J. Trump inserted into the narrative might be

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better construed as Trump as conceived of by the author, and so a partial and perhaps inaccurate Donald. Turn now to the ethics of boundary crossings, cases where artists, appreciators, and critics try to understand, speak about, perhaps even speak for, those with less privilege. The uneven distribution of power and privilege along lines of race, sex, class, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, age, and more make for multiple systems of oppression. Marilyn Frye, writing about the specific case of sexism, uses the vivid analogy of a birdcage to explain why the victims of oppression might not even realize they are being harmed. As she puts it, if you just concentrate on just one wire, you don’t see why the bird can’t simply go around it. Only stepping back and taking into account the interconnected system of barriers shows the bird to be imprisoned.55 Vision metaphors also come into play when we ask whether those with more power and privilege can understand the experience of the oppressed. Under what circumstances can we take on the perspective of a less privileged other? Consider one example: attitudes toward the police. Teaching on a campus that adjoins Ferguson, Missouri, I realize that in the wake of the Michael Brown shooting few Ferguson residents will endorse the attitude illustrated by Norman Rockwell’s well-known painting The Runaway from 1958.56 The painting shows a freckle-faced red-haired little boy sitting at a lunch counter. The red bandana bedecked hobo stick beneath at his feet shows he is in the process of running away, but the smiling policeman on the adjoining stool is clearly chatting him up and bringing him back into the fold. Our discussion of Nichols and Stich’s PWB diagnoses the difficulty of lowering or removing these barriers to understanding, since those in more privileged circumstances will populate the PWB with their own beliefs about the police when contextualizing the clamped claims generated by this painting. That is, those of us who, like Norman Rockwell, experienced small town New England life in the 1950s might well import beliefs along the lines of “The police are our friends”; this is not likely to be the case for present-day residents of Ferguson. Contemporary criticism might dismiss Rockwell as nostalgic at best. “The Runaway” would appear to falsify class and race relations by portraying a world that is long gone if it ever existed. But Rockwell can’t be accused of cultural appropriation in any of Young’s three senses. Consider some artistic examples that do seem to exhibit this flaw. We noted the case of Dana Schutz’s painting of Emmett Till. Joel Rudinow published a paper titled “Race, Ethnicity, Expressive Authenticity: Can White People

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Sing the Blues?” 57 raising the same question of the exploitation of black experience. Rap and hip hop are newer genres that prompt questions about boundary crossings, social harm, and proprietary content.58 In a recent roundtable in the website Aesthetics for Birds, James Young and six other academics hold forth on the permissibility of cultural appropriation, taking as their central example the divergent cases of two white rappers.59 Eminem, raised poor in Detroit, has garnered considerable acclaim while the Australian Iggy Azalea—a white female so doubly an outsider in this world—is disparaged. These are two cases where white artists attempt to make their own what had initially been a black genre, one focusing primarily on black urban experience.60 It is not entirely clear from the discussion whether Azalea is condemned for her presumption alone, or also because of the poor quality of her product.61 Eminem and Iggy Azalea occupy artist positions in the debate about cultural appropriation. But the cautions just voiced also apply to critics attempting to penetrate the lives of individuals or groups with less power. Let us close by returning our attention to critics’ role. We can easily arrive at another reductio if we demand that only members of a given group can criticize art emanating from that group. Consider the case of classical music. Can Smetana only be assessed by Bohemian critics, Wagner only by Nazi sympathizers? Elaborating the Suitability Requirement set out in Chapter Five can allow us to formulate circumstances under which critical tasks can be assigned more widely. But mind-reading, the topic we have been exploring here, doesn’t straightforwardly come into play in assessing instrumental music.62 Accordingly, let’s switch to an example from the art of literature that clearly offers opportunities to mindread across barriers of race and class. I have in mind Kathryn Stockett’s novel The Help, made into an award-winning film. Turning to The Help triples the loci of the concern in question as the situation within the book— Skeeter Phelan, a white woman, college educated but still living on her parents’ cotton farm, presumes to solicit and edit narratives from Jackson, Mississippi, area maids—is structurally echoed at two further levels: Stockett, the white author of the novel, presumes to chronicle race and class relations in 1960s Mississippi, and assorted critics writing reviews of the book—for instance, Janet Maslin for the New York Times, Sybil Steinberg for the Washington Post, Amy Sharps for The Guardian—further amplify this structural dilemma as they are white women weighing in on a book by a white author about the experiences of black maids in the South. Interestingly, the reviews offer mark-

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edly differing overall assessments. While both Sharps and Steinberg praise Stockett unreservedly and assume her understanding can leap barriers of race and class, Maslin voices reservations: “This is . . . an informative masterpiece, educating people about life of the help in the segregated society of Jackson, Mississippi in the early 1960s, using some of her personal experiences of growing up in the deep south.” [Sharps, The Guardian, 9/19, 2013] “Her first novel . . . strikes every note with authenticity. In a pageturner that brings new resonance to the moral issues involved , she spins a story of social awakening as seen from both sides of the American racial divide.” [Steinberg, The Washington Post, 4/1/2009] “Here is a debut novel by a Southern-born white author who renders black maids’ voices in thick, dated dialect. . . . It’s a story that purports to value the maids’ lives while subordinating them to Skeeter and her writing ambitions.” [Maslin, New York Times, February 18, 2009] All three critics praise the liveliness and texture of the two main black characters, the maids Aibileen and Minny, so they credit Stockett with successful boundary crossing in inventing them. And in fact Stockett has told interviewers that she is basing her account on her own experience growing up in Jackson, Mississippi, and being raised by a black maid, Demetrie. Importantly, the actress Viola Davis who earned an Academy Award nomination for her performance as Aibileen has just recently said that she regrets having accepted the role. In a New York Times interview she declared: I just felt that at the end of the day that it wasn’t the voices of the maids that were heard. I know Aibileen. I know Minny. They’re my grandma. They’re my mom. And I know that if you do a movie where the whole premise is, I want to know what it feels like to work for white people and to bring up children in 1963, I want to hear how you really feel about it. I never heard that in the course of the movie.63 Can particular arts answer Davis’s complaint—make those voices heard, make real and palpable feelings like those of the maids in question? Suzanne Keen suggests this isn’t in principle beyond the power of literature. In her 2007 book Empathy and the Novel, Keen advocates novel reading as a way to expand our horizons.64 She is here a fellow traveler with Martha Nussbaum, who famously offered up fiction reading as a pre- eminent mode of moral education65. But while Nussbaum made her case through a

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reading of Henry James’s The Golden Bowl, Keen focuses on the power of popular fiction, book clubs, Oprah’s reading list, and the like. Keen cites empirical work to buttress her claims and notes that middlebrow readers “report feeling both empathy with and sympathy for fictional characters. They believe that novel reading opens their minds to experiences, dilemmas, time periods, places, and situations that would otherwise be closed to them” (ix). Though Keen champions the ability of literature to open our eyes to others’ situations, she qualifies the connection between empathetic reading and altruistic actions. She believes those who achieve some level of empathy are aided by teachers, discussion group members, listed book club questions, and more. And she thinks we don’t generally put down our novels and rush out to march in the streets. Keen also acknowledges the sorts of barriers under discussion here. She allows that “an empathetic performance may appear condescending to its object or to an observer” and states some opponents regard empathy “as a typical manifestation of Western arrogance, imagining common ground with the victims of global capitalism and fantasizing relationships of emotional recognition in place of the unseemly relation of consumers to the exploited. Empathy, in this light, becomes a delusion of the affluent West” (xxiv). Return to the critic’s role, what should we ask of critical responses? Rather than recusing themselves from assessing The Help, the three critics quoted above—all white women—weighed in on the plausibility and depth of the novel’s black characters and on its persuasiveness in vividly recreating the experience of Southern black maids in the Jim Crow south. We can only ask that critics do their very best to advance along the mind-reading continuum we sketched in considering Maibom’s account of perspective taking. In the case of The Help, we expect them to employ good will and effort in trying to put themselves in the place of Aibileen and Minnie. Present-day readers should try their very best to understand the experience of black maids in 1960s Jackson, Mississippi, while realizing that they will never fully achieve this goal.66 Surely some critics are better empaths than others, and some have more factual and cultural (as opposed to purely artworld relevant) background information they can put to use in contextualizing a given fictional world and its characters. For example, white critics who have explored the newly established Civil Rights Trail with sites in thirteen Southern states may be better positioned to assess The Help than peers who have not had this experience; white critics who have taken a black history course may know more about the times in which The Help is set. But note how far this is from the notions of Humean

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practice and comparison built into our account of critical expertise. Those were limited to artworld considerations. Must critics also be versed in any historical, cultural, and social information needed to contextualize the works they judge? Hume’s freedom from prejudice requirement ensures some degree of good will, and our Suitability Requirement might rule out some inappropriate critic/work pairings. But artists must also do their share to enable mindreading and immersion. Effective works will successfully draw appreciators into fictional worlds where characters are vivid, plots detailed and engrossing. With these presuppositions in place, we should support critics’ attempts to enter and assess fictional worlds. The identities critics claim at the outset should not disqualify them from particular assignments. But critics must acknowledge their own standpoints and the privilege that travels with them. These can distance critics from the characters with whom they attempt to engage and make it likely that the understanding achieved will be partial at best. I believe the most we can ask of such critics is that they stay humble and try hard to understand. Humean practice and comparison, when employed in the service of critical assignments that meet the Suitability Requirement, guarantee that the critics possess the knowledge and experience needed to contextualize the works they judge. But filling in the underdetermined aspects of plot and character in narrative works can require relevant life experience as well knowledge of art. These demands exceed the criteria that Hume proposed and also the supplements I put in place. In closing, we might tack on one last desideratum proposed by James Grant in his book on criticism: we want those rare critics who possess Hume’s requisite skills as well as the real-life requirements that supplement them to also be effective communicators so that they can share their hard-won insights with their audience.

C odA: bAd ArT, meAn C riTiC s In closing, I would like to briefly touch on two remaining challenges to effective criticism—the dilemmas that bad art and mean critics pose for critical practice. What’s wrong with bad art, and how can it be identified? Connoisseurs might simply claim “I know it when I see it.” But that doesn’t help less gifted appreciators. There are various sites where bad art is on offer. The Museum of Bad Art, aptly housed in the basement of a Somerville, Massachusetts, movie theater, displays rotating selections from a permanent collection of paintings amassed according to an arch

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and amusing set of principles— e.g., “no works on velvet,” “no paint by numbers,” “no deliberately made bad art.”67 The entire collection can be viewed at http://museumofbadart.org/. It is indeed amusing. Aesthetes might object that our time is better spent with more rewarding works. But recall Levinson’s claim that we all, critics and amateurs alike, need some aesthetic down time. He illustrated this by inviting us to imagine appreciators relaxing with an episode of Sex and the City. In this light consider too the appeal of a tried and true Hercule Poirot novel or a screening of The Godfather. Most of the works in MOBA’s collection seem garish and inept. But doubt can surface. If a piece were re-contextualized, say, hung in New York’s Museum of Modern Art, would we remain confident that it lacked all value? I believe it is the case that, in today’s artworld, anything goes. Bona-fide works can be knowingly inept, off-putting, transgressive. The merits of any given work turn on the artworld in which it originated and the intentions with which it was produced. These are details that wellinformed critics would be in a position to retrieve. There are literary counterparts to MOBA. The Stuffed Owl is an anthology of bad verse, much of it overly sentimental Victorian poetry. The Bulwer-Lytton Contest, inspired by that author’s 1830 novel Paul Clifford, asks entrants to come up with the worst possible opening sentence for a novel. Here is the 2008 winner: “Theirs was a New York love, a checkered taxi ride burning rubber, and like the city their passion was open 24/7, steam rising from their bodies like slick streets exhaling warm, moist, white breath through manhole covers stamped ‘Forged by DeLaney Bros., Piscataway, N.J.’” Finally, many cinemaphiles agree that the worst movie all-time is Ed Wood’s Plan 9 from Outer Space. The production values are laughable—what looks like a tin-foil- covered paper plate careens across the screen to indicate a flying saucer, and when Bela Lugosi died in the middle of filming, Wood simply had a stand-in play the rest of the role with a large cape raised up and held to cover his face. Predictably, there are other contenders for worst film of all time and websites and awards that fuel the conflict.68 The Room (2003), written and directed by and starring Tommy Wiseau, is generally considered appalling; detractors cite its tangled and impenetrable plot structure. The film became so infamous that one of Wiseau’s costars, Greg Sestero, published a memoir, The Disaster Artist, about its production, and that memoir was subsequently made into a movie of the same name starring James Franco. Ironically, that movie was a hit. Peter Travers subtitled his Rolling Stone review “James Franco Takes on Worst Movie Ever—And Wins.”69

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Can we extract from this brief survey any principles that would help us identify bad art? Unfortunately not. Consider some possible criteria: 1. It’s ugly. Not all great art is beautiful. Many powerful and important subject matters don’t lend themselves to beauty. Think of Goya’s works on the horrors of war, or Shakespeare’s portraits of villains and villainy. The philosopher Timothy Binkley has coined the category “anti-aesthetic art” to characterize some very important twentiethcentury works which are entirely without sensory appeal—for example, Duchamp’s LHOOQ, in which the artist Marcel Duchamp scrawled a mustache on a print of the Mona Lisa, or Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased DeKooning Drawing in which he did just that: purchased, entirely erased, and then exhibited a drawing by his contemporary. 2. There’s no apparent artistry. The complaints “I could do that,” “My child could do that,” “A monkey could do that” capture people’s frustration with much modern art. Some “seminal” works are indeed simple— consider the first-ever monochromatic paintings, attributed to the Russian Constructivist Kasimir Malevich—but not simple minded. Another famous example is Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain, a white porcelain urinal submitted to the Society of Independent Artists Exhibit in 1917. It may be the most discussed of all modern works. Works without surface intricacy or that do not appear to have tapped into artistic skills that artists took years to develop can nevertheless convey complex ideas, arouse complex emotions. 3. It’s sentimental. This criticism is hard to pin down, but some people feel that excessive sentimentality is a flaw in art, in part because it ensures that the works are not true to life.70 Examples here might include childrens’ deathbed scenes in Dickens, Thomas Kinkade’s many images of warm light streaming from snow-covered stone cottages beside meandering streams, Norman Rockwell’s endless variations on a bygone and innocent America in his Saturday Evening Post covers. While some of these examples may fail to be high art, or great art (Kinkade’s website declares him “America’s most collected living artist”), being true to life does not seem a plausible requirement here. We often look to art to take us to alternative realms. And why should we insist that great art always take us to darker, rather than to cheerier, places? 4. Flawed content. This is perhaps an extension of the previous complaint. While some works of art are all about pattern or sensory sur-

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face, other works convey ideas. We are rightly critical of art that presents vapid or puerile content. Works that not only present but also endorse morally vicious ideas are also criticized. But shouldn’t we accept any art that plugs into enduring and universal human concerns? There are many ways to make this connection. Some artists do it by purposefully focusing on the mundane and the quotidian. Examples that come to mind here include the fiction of Ann Beattie, Bobbie Ann Mason, and Frederick Barthelme. 5. Lack of creativity. Our complaint about forgeries, even when they’re created with great skill, is that they involve the theft of someone else’s creativity. So perhaps work that is derivative or unoriginal, is, other things equal, always going to be of lesser value. Unfortunately, there are counterexamples ready at hand even to this seemingly plausible principle. Some twentieth-century artists practiced what was called appropriationist art. It was about originality, and they used lack of originality to make their point— e.g., Sherry Levine took photos of famous photos (like Dorothea Lange’s WPA studies of gaunt migrant workers) and exhibited them as her own. I hope this extremely quick survey discourages any attempt to formulate necessary or sufficient conditions for bad art. Tolstoy famously claimed “every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Bad art seems similarly varied.71 But absent simple criteria to sort good art from bad, worthy from unworthy, critics can still do their work. Recall that Noël Carroll insisted critics are in the business of offering reasoned evaluations. They can arrive at these, once paired with suitable works, by judging each in the context of its originating time and place and also in reference to a rich and artfully assembled comparison class. Return to that monochromatic canvas. Such an object presented in the sixteenth century would have had no chance of becoming art; the artworld wasn’t ready for abstraction, let alone minimalism, at that time. Yet the same canvas presented today would be old-hat, too unoriginal to merit our attention. Thus the very same object could be not art, good art, or bad art, depending on the time and artworld in which it was produced. This example shows why works of art must be judged using background information indexed to two very different moments. Critics must know about a work’s originating artworld—what were other artists were doing at the time? what expectations did their audiences have? what prior or contemporary works were valued?—as well as the artworld framing the current assessment—the same questions apply here. As we noted in

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chapter 4, most artists consciously create in response to their sense of the history of their art. This lets them knowingly reinforce, or extend, or subvert, or undermine what their predecessors have done. It is against these more wide-ranging motivations that each work’s merits can be calculated. Some art will indeed be found wanting in ways that can be supported by argument and example. The collected experiences Hume flagged with the rubrics “practice” and “comparison” allow ideal critics to make such assessments and correctly call out bad art. Even when we have determined that a given work is bad, the question remains, does it merit extended critical response? Can we learn from the dismantling of failed works? Is it wrong for critics to treat such works dismissively? Does meanness have any place in the critical canon? Certainly, cruel and vicious reviews generate a sort of frisson. Snark can be amusing, outright meanness can be jaw-dropping, perhaps triggering the schadenfreude that lurks within many of us. Portions of Robert Hughes’ review of David Salle in Time Magazine— certainly not a rarified locale for the discussion of art—remain seared in my memory. Hughes said of Salle “His line has all the verve of chewed string,” and, more summarily, “He is incapable of making an interesting mark.” The first claim is a vivid metaphor; for some reason it always makes me imagine the equally abhorrent sensation of chewing on a piece of chalk; the second remark is stunningly dismissive, it generates an echoing silence. Is the critical audience enlightened by such remarks, do we learn from the diagnosis of a work’s or an artist’s singular faults? If Hughes’s assessment is defensible—if it can be supported through judiciously chosen comparisons and through further elucidation of the failure of Salle’s lines and marks—then Hughes’ review seems both amusing and educative. While it might be better to let many unworthy works languish undiscussed, the clamor that Salle’s pieces generated in the artworld—his representation by the Mary Boone Gallery, the many prestigious museums that own his paintings, his collaborations with playwrights and choreographers—vindicate the critical attention lavished on this artist, including Hughes’ contrarian response. Hughes could be a scathing critic. A collection of his essays appearing in 1990 was titled Nothing if Not Critical, and Dwight Garner’s New York Times review of Hughes’s posthumously published collection The Spectacle of Skill was subtitled “An Aesthete’s Unsparing Eye.” Garner quotes a number of zingers and asserts that “this formidable writer had a far better feel for dead artists than living ones. . . . He loathed most American art of the 1980s.” 72 Does this mean Hughes should have been excused

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from reviewing David Salle’s work? This may seem a fatal challenge to my Suitability Requirement, but we need to allow for what I’ll call Critical Presbyopia—the lack of distance when we judge works not yet framed by the test of time. In such cases, we must simply weigh Hughes’ claims about Salle and other painters of the 1980s and note how his remarks shape our aesthetic experience. If Hughes’ comments and comparisons help us grasp the properties Salle’s paintings possess and, just as important, help us become aware of elements his paintings lack, then we should let ourselves be persuaded. Hughes’ foes agree that he writes wonderfully; his assessment of some of the artworld stars of the 1980s may prove prescient. James Elkins, in his monograph What Happened to Art Criticism, complains that criticism of the visual arts has become too bland and descriptive. He derides the critical pieces available in local papers and art magazines, declaring “There just isn’t enough meat in them to make a meal: some are fluffy, others conventional, or clotted with polysyllabic praise, or confused, or just very, very familiar. Art criticism is diaphanous: it’s like a veil, floating in the breeze of cultural conversations and not quite settling anywhere.” 73 Elkins certainly mixes metaphors in composing this diatribe.74 But his complaint, that criticism of the visual arts has become flaccid and unmoored, comes through loud and clear. The takeaway: reviews should be probing and incisive, and some degree of edginess is welcome. Across the arts, there are critics who seem to follow this pattern; some take pride in their reputation for meanness. For example, Dale Peck titled a collection of his reviews Hatchet Jobs.75 In his introduction, Peck claims that “Mud-slinging is just more fun to read than a discussion of how stream- ofconsciousness narration renders synaptic processes in prose” (3). He notes that Virginia Woolf, in her journals, called Joyce’s Ulysses diffuse, brackish, pretentious, and underbred (3).76 In a New York Times review of poetry criticism by William Logan, Robert Baird situates the author with this extended trope: “For most critics, writing a negative review is roughly as appealing as euthanizing a beloved corgi. When the deed must be done . . . the unfortunate task is executed with maximum stirrings of pity and regret. . . . Logan’s negative reviews read more like giddy blood sport.” The specificity of Baird’s put-down is notable—he invites us to imagine putting down not just any anonymous dog, but a beloved corgi; Hughes’ chewed string metaphor dismissing Salle was equally specific. This reminds us that the best critics are themselves effective prose stylists, their reviews not simply instrumental utilitarian reports from the sidelines. Baird goes on

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to quote from Logan’s review of Ted Kooser’s Home Repair Manual: “Ted Kooser is a prairie sentimentalist who writes poems in an American vernacular so cornfed you could raise hogs on it.” I have been suggesting that there can be an art even to the creation of very negative criticism. And since one purpose of criticism is to warn appreciators away from works that will waste their time, critics need not devote themselves solely to championing and explaining exemplary works.77 Accounts of how some works fail can illuminate ways that others can succeed, and memorably mean reviews might drive home these points in especially effective ways. One might object that unalloyed negativity can impair the practical use of criticism. This worry recalls the moral concern that persistent lying or promise-breaking could shred the fabric of fidelity. Might mean-spirited criticism subtly undermine our established practice of critical exchange by dampening enthusiasm and damaging reputations? Certainly nonstop negativity could have this effect. But individuals differ, and critics will be varyingly worthy of such labels as: witty, acerbic, bombastic, insightful, opinionated, cutting, etc. Hume reminded us of this in his discussion of blameless differences. Some critics are inherently encouraging, others intolerant of unsuccessful tries. Some critics try always to elevate, others take pride in their meanness. We like to think of the critics whose advice we seek as individuals we have come to know and admire. We sometimes prize individuals who have a gift for pointed gossip, and cruel reviews may spark a boring day. Though filling our pantheon of friends with such characters would seem a moral failing. Once we ensure that particular work/critic pairings are appropriate (by appeal to Hume’s Freedom from Prejudice condition along with my proposed Suitability Requirement) and make allowances for Critical Presbyopia (i.e., for judgments made before the test of time has come into play), we will be better positioned to decide what critical comments to welcome. The prospect of censoring critics who, though mean-spirited, are wellenough matched to the works they lambaste raises questions that are current in other areas of society and academe, i.e., questions .concerning first amendment protections and trigger warning proclamations. So in the end, I think we need to tolerate occasional mean reviews if they make persuasive points about their targets and flow from the reviewer’s critical resume, broadly conceived, not from special animus directed against a given artist. But many more reviews will be unaffected by such worries and will contribute to the ongoing conversation about art and its place in our life.

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Taking up these final normative questions completes my account of how practical criticism can be vibrant and useful. I have tried throughout to reformulate and repurpose key themes from Hume’s Essay in order to rehabilitate the notion of expertise, elevate Hume’s notion of an ideal critic, and show its relevance to our artworld today. I urge my readers to enjoy the arts, and to seek out congenial critics to serve as guides.

Appendix: A Checklist for Appreciation

A. Form: • • • • • •

What properties does the work present to my senses? Which senses are involved? What aesthetic properties does the work possess? Are there special qualities to note? Do larger patterns emerge? Is the form pleasing overall?

B. Representation, “aboutness”: • Is the work abstract, or do the forms represent something beyond themselves? • Do they imitate something recognizable from the real world, or create an alternative imagined realm? • What is the subject matter of the work? • How realistic is the representation? • What effects, if any, are achieved by distortion, exaggeration, omission, and the like?

C. Emotion, Expressiveness: • • • • •

Are there specific feelings connected with this work? Does it reveal emotions felt by the artist during creation? Does it depict beings in the throes of emotion? Does it contain or show forth feeling in some more abstract way? Does it trigger feelings in me?

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D. Narrative: • Is the work an instance of narrative art— does it tell a story? (NB—not all art does this.) • If so, what are the main characters and their situation? • How is the story conveyed/told/recounted?

E. Meaning, Content: • What is the point of this work? • Is there a message the artist is trying to convey, something that the work is saying about the subject matter? • What aspects of the work “deliver” this content? • Does the work give rise to competing interpretations?

F. Background Knowledge: • Would additional information—about the art in question, the artist, the genre of the work, the time period in which was produced, other works by the same artist, similar works by different artists, and more—increase my understanding? • Are there ways I can obtain the relevant information?

G. Overall Evaluation: • Is this a worthy work of art? Why or why not? • Does the artist succeed in whatever he or she is trying to do?

Acknowledgments

A number of people and institutions have supported this drawn out endeavor. My campus home, the Department of Philosophy at the University of Missouri– St. Louis, has always been especially congenial and energizing. The American Society for Aesthetics has sustained me throughout my career, providing a community of insightful aestheticians and a full schedule of stimulating conferences. I tried out many of my ideas at ASA meetings and published papers drawn from this manuscript in the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, sponsored by the Society, as well as the British Journal of Aesthetics, sponsored by its European counterpart, and the Philosophical Quarterly. A fellowship at the Center for Humanities at Oregon State University kick-started this entire project in 2008 and a University of Missouri Research Board award in 2013 helped to advance it further. Jenefer Robinson has been a cheery and informative sounding board over the years; our institution of “coaching calls” has spurred progress and made writing fun. I am grateful to two anonymous referees who greenlighted my prospectus and then generously circled back many years later to read and assess my finished manuscript. Finally, I thank my long-suffering editor at the University of Chicago Press, Elizabeth Branch Dyson, for never giving up, and I’m grateful that Kyle Wagner, her capable and supportive successor, took the handoff so capably when her responsibilities changed.

Notes

i n T roduC T ion 1. The monthly broadcast of Opening Soon at a Theater Near You (1975–77) was succeeded by Sneak Previews (1977– 81) which first aired biweekly, then switched to once a week. The duo then moved to network television as Sneak Previews was succeeded first by At the Movies (1981– 86), then by Siskel and Ebert at the Movies (1986– 99). 2. Joel Sternberg, Museum of Broadcast Communications, online article. http:// emmytvlegends.org/interviews/shows/siskel-ebert-the-movies. 3. http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2012/03/siskel_and_ebert_an_oral _history_.html. The comment about the length of taping comes from Larry Dieckhaus who was executive producer of Siskel & Ebert for a decade (1987– 97). Mary Kellogg, senior vice president of programming and production for Buena Vista Television, recalls that “they would literally argue about everything,” while Donna LaPietra, executive producer from 1986 to 1987, characterized their relationship as “like a peevish marriage.” 4. From The Big Bang Theory, episode 25, “The Lizard Spock Expansion,” first aired Nov. 17, 2008. 5. Frank Sibley, “Aesthetic Concepts,” Philosophical Review 68, no. 4 (1959): 421– 50. David Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” in Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Classics, 1985). 6. Jerrold Levinson, “Hume’s Standard of Taste: The Real Problem,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 60, no. 3 (2002): 227–38. “Artistic Worth and Personal Taste,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 68, no. 3 (2010): 225–33. 7. Ted Cohen, “Jokes,” in Pleasure, Preference, and Value, ed. Eva Schaper (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 8. Noël Carroll, On Criticism (New York: Routledge, 2009), 7. 9. Carroll’s view seems a variant of the account of criticism proposed by Monroe Beardsley in his 1958 book Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism. Beardsley there allotted the critic a trio of tasks: explication, elucidation, and interpreta-

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tion. In addition, he maintained that assessments should be organized around the Three General Canons of Unity, Complexity, and Intensity. 10. Noël Carroll, The Philosophy of Motion Pictures (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008), 192– 93. 11. Peter Lamarque, The Philosophy of Literature (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2009), 257. 12. Arthur Danto, The State of the Art (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1987), 2. 13. Ibid. 14. I believe that the opposition Carroll proposes between consumer-reporting and taste-making criticism can be bridged to some extent. While a piece of criticism might say to the reader, “You will like this” (consumer reporting) or announce “You ought to like this” (taste making), it might also profitably offer this blend: “Given your current preferences, you can come to like this, and you ought to try to do so.” The relations between critics and those they advise that motivate this suggestion will be taken up in Chapter Six.

ChAp Ter one 1. He notes, “The proverb has justly determined it to be fruitless to dispute concerning tastes.” David Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” in Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Classics: 1985), 230. Future references to this Essay will be cited parenthetically in the text. 2. Parenting.com, “Picky Eater Solutions.” 3. Many come from legitimate venues—the Mayo Clinic, webmd, parenting.com, and more. 4. Why Is My Child a Picky Eater? by Mary Mullen, MS RD and Jo Ellen Shield, MED RD LD. From the website KidsEatRite.org. 5. See Jeffrey Blitz, “Small Plates,” New York Times Magazine, October 10, 2014. 6. There’s even a Wikipedia entry on foodies, which defines the category as follows: “A foodie is a gourmet, or a person who has an ardent or refined interest in food and alcoholic beverages.[1] A foodie seeks new food experiences as a hobby rather than simply eating out for convenience or hunger.” 7. Now so numerous that this website lists the top 20! http://www.tv.com/shows /category/food-and- cooking/ 8. Carolyn Korsmeyer, Making Sense of Taste: Food and Philosophy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999). Korsmeyer distinguishes Taste from taste on p. 38; she sets out the difference between taste sensation and taste experience on pp. 81– 82. 9. Korsmeyer explains that complete sensation involves the nasal passages while reflective sensation “involves the evaluation arrived at after pensive swallowing” (82). 10. For example: “The tongue only has receptors for sweet, sour, bitter, salt, savoury and metallic—it has no receptors for strawberry, cherry, mint, etc. These are contributed by olfaction and the resulting combination of taste and smell is called flavor. . . . Many things contribute to the flavours we experience when tasting, including touch. Temperature makes a difference. . . . In addition to touch, taste and smell, there is a contribution from the trigeminal nerve (or facial nerve) that serves the eyes, the nose and the jaw. This nerve is irritated by spices, making mustard

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taste hot and peppermint taste cool.” From the web posting “Food for Thought: Thought for Food,” https://foodthoughtfood.wordpress.com/reflections/barry-c -smith/. 11. My claim is qualified to limit its scope to phenomenological as opposed to physiological taste and smell. See section 3 below for a discussion of taste and smell as the chemical senses. 12. A related point is made about sight in philosopher Frank Jackson’s famous paper about Mary, a brilliant neuroscientist raised in an entirely black and white world. Mary knows that red is the color associated with light of a certain wavelength, but she has never been acquainted with what we might call phenomenal red. Frank Jackson 1986, “What Mary Didn’t Know,” Journal of Philosophy 83 (1986): 291– 95. 13. Granted, oenophiles do discern component notes and flavors in the wines they taste. Their practices will be the subject of the following section. 14. In a 2007 article in Slate, Mike Steinberger describes similar variations in olfaction. While visiting the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, he was handed “a plastic tube holding a clear liquid and asked . . . to take a whiff; I couldn’t smell a thing. The liquid contained andostenone, a mammalian pheromone found in boar saliva. In a random sampling of 100 people, around half will detect nothing, 15 or so will smell an inoffensive musky-floral-woody aroma, and the rest will be thoroughly repulsed by a liquid that, to them, reeks of stale urine or particularly nasty body odor.” Steinberger reports another asnomia that arises when subjects are asked to sniff Galaxolide, a chemical used in cosmetics. Its fragrance is only detectable to 60 percent of people. “Do You Taste What I Taste: The Physiology of the Wine Critic,” Slate, June 20, 2007. 15. The relevant gene is TAS2R28. 16. For example, see Benjamin, Silcock, Kieser, Waddell, Swain, and Everett, “Development of a Model Mouth Containing an Artifical Tongue to Measure the Release of Volatile Compounds,” Innovative Food Science and Emerging Technologies 15 (2012): 96–103. 17. Her critique draws an analogy between environmental destruction and rape, arguing that each instantiates a mode of domination that must be combatted. See Karen J. Warren, “The Power and the Promise of Ecological Feminism,” Environmental Ethics 12 (1990): 125–46. 18. The charges she addresses are these: taste is an impoverished sense limited to four basic categories; much of what we credit to the sense of taste is more properly owed to the sense of smell; taste is a primitive sense that operates in the service of savage appetites; taste is relativized to both individuals and cultures. See pp. 75– 94. 19. Note the comparable benefits that musicologists derive from their elaborate notation and theory! 20. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oenophilia. 21. Questions of Taste: The Philosophy of Wine, ed. Barry C. Smith (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). Further references to this volume will be cited parenthetically in the text. 22. See p. 15 for the extension of this point to the sense of taste: “Tastes belong with smells and sounds in the onotological category of secondary objects.” Contrast the view of Elizabeth Telfer, who argues that food can be a minor art. In her book Food

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for Thought: Philosophy and Food (New York: Routledge, 1996), she proposes an ontology that equates a work with a particular dish— e.g., Lobster Newburg, Beef Wellington. She also notes this interesting challenge to appreciation: eaters sampling a dish can’t count on receiving the same ingredients in the same proportions with each serving or each bite. (50) 23. Here are the twelve categories with examples of each: chemical (sulfur), pungent (alcohol), oxidized (acetaldehyde), microbiological (yeast), floral (geraniums), spicy (licorice), fruity (blackcurrent), vegetative (artichoke), nutty (hazelnut), caramelized (butterscotch), woody (vanilla), earthy (mildew). 24. This parallels the central claim in Kendall Walton’s paper “Categories of Art,” to be discussed in Chapter Two, that works of art are always assessed as falling within a specific category. A normative question then arises—is there a proper category to be selected for each work? 25. Much here would turn on how we choose to vet critics. A solution along these lines to the more general problem of critical disagreement in the arts will be set out and defended in chapter 5. 26. In one section of his paper subtitled “Tracking Sensory Discrimination,” Bach advocates the construction of similarity spaces, using techniques of muiltidimensional scaling, to track individuals’ responsiveness to nuances of taste. 27. Note that this places them on a par with experts in terms of sensory experience. 28. The key question being “How can we ever truly know what another person is experiencing?” Consider the voluminous literature on qualia. Thomas Nagel’s classic paper “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” (Philosophical Review 83, no. 4 [1974]: 435– 50) and the commentary it generated extend the debate across species lines. 29. Cain Todd, “Expression and Objectivity in the Case of Wine: Defending the Aesthetic Terroir of Tastes and Smells” in Rivista di Estetica 52, no. 3 (2012): 95–113. 30. The reference is to Kendall Walton’s justly famous paper “Categories of Art” Philosophical Review 79, no. 3 (1970): 334– 67. Walton there argued that the aesthetic properties possessed by a work of art vary with the categories within which it is perceived. Moreover, there is a normative aspect to category placement. Within a given artworld, works are correctly perceived in some categories, misperceived in others. I will take up these points in more detail in chapter 2. 31. He proposes five dimensions to which we must attend in determining category placement: variety (chardonnay, pinot noir), geography (country, region, local terroir), age (maturity), style (red, white, sparkling, dry, fruity, sweet, full-bodied, New World, Old World), and quality (grand cru, fine wine, table wine, simple, sophisticated) (Todd, p. 102) 32. He is contextualizing a famous 2004 debate between wine experts Jancis Robinson and Robert Parker. They disagreed in their evaluation of a 2003 Chateau Pavie, but only Parker sampled the wine under blind-tasting conditions. Todd, pp. 103, 104. 33. See below, pp. 24–25. 34. I thank John Martin for raising this worry in an especially strenuous way. I realize that he would not be satisfied with my response. 35. The site is sponsored by the Department of Neurobiology and Anatomy of the UT-Houston Medical School; Max O. Hutchins, the author of this particular chapter, is affiliated with the Department of Integrative Biology and Pharmacology.

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36. “Taste receptor cells are spindle shaped, modified neuro- epithelial cells that extend from the base to the apex of the taste buds. Voltage-gated channel proteins for Na+, K+ & Ca2+ are present in the plasma membrane . . . . Microvilli from each taste cell project into the taste pores which communicate with the dissolved solutes on the surface of the tongue. These receptor cells are innervated by afferent nerve fibers [which] branch extensively and receive synaptic input from the taste receptor cells.” http://neuroscience.uth.tmc.edu/s2/chapter09.html 37. Amy Coombs, “Scientia Vitis: Decanting the Chemistry of Wine Flavor,” Distillations, Winter 2008/9. https://www.sciencehistory.org/distillations/magazine /scientia-vitis-decanting-the- chemistry- of-wine-flavor 38. David Derbyshire, “Wine Tasting—It’s Junk Science,” The Guardian, June 2013. http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/jun/23/wine-tasting-junk-science -analysis 39. See their website: http://www.monell.org/research. 40. David McRaney, “You Are Not So Smart: Why We Can’t Tell Good Wine from Bad,” The Atlantic, 2011. http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2011/10/you-are -not-so -smart-why-we- cant-tell-good-wine-from-bad/247240/. 41. Mike Steinberger, “Do You Taste What I Taste? The physiology of the wine critic.” Slate, June 20, 2007, http://www.slate.com/articles/life/drink/2007/06/do_you _taste_what_i_taste.html. 42. I believe a similar tale can be told about the odors of romano cheese and ginko tree fruits after the first frost. 43. Surely we all know individuals who desperately want to pursue tasks, perhaps even careers, to which they are entirely unsuited. 44. One faction in Britain’s Civil Wars (1642– 51) came to be known as the Levellers, though the reforms they supported would hardly count as radical or egalitarian today. Compendiums of slang and the regular revision of dictionaries to accommodate new words and phrasings indicate a leveling approach to the evolution of language. 45. The following is part of the elaboration one can access by clicking “About Wikipedia” on the opening page: “People of all ages, cultures and backgrounds can add or edit article prose, references, images and other media here. What is contributed is more important than the expertise or qualifications of the contributor.” 46. Andrew Keen takes this approach to task in his book The Cult of the Amateur (New York: Doubleday, 2007). 47. They explain the process as follows: “Netflix has a special AI feature that lets it learn what kind of movies you like for the purpose of suggestions. You can rate movies in Netflix to make this feature better.” Compare services like Pandora, that purports to analyze subscriber preferences and stream music that they will like. The suggestions with which Amazon.com badgers return users arise from the same sort of similarity-space analysis. 48. Initially a phone survey queried one thousand subjects here in the US; the project was later extended to thirteen other countries. See the website maintained by the Dia Foundation to document this project: https://www.diaart.org/program /exhibitions-projects/komar-melamid-the-most-wanted-paintings-web -project Also Benjamin Sutton, “This Is America’s Most Wanted Painting,” Art (2018).

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49. Here is Richard B. Woodward’s condensed summary of many of the questions and results from his 1994 New York Times article about the project: If you had to name one color as your favorite, what would it be? Blue (44 percent), green (12 percent), red (11 percent), black and purple (4 percent each), brown and pink (3 percent each), yellow, fuchsia, beige, maroon, mauve and white (2 percent each), orange, gold, teal and peach (1 percent each). Do you prefer paintings that are related to religion (20 percent) or not related to religion (63 percent)? Do you like to see expressive brush strokes on the canvas (53 percent), or do you prefer that the surface of the canvas be smooth (35 percent)? Would you rather see paintings of outdoor scenes (88 percent) or indoor scenes (5 percent)? Which type of outdoor scene appeals to you most? Forests (19 percent), lakes, rivers, oceans and seas (49 percent), fields and rural scenes (18 percent), city (3 percent). Which season would you like to see depicted? Winter (15 percent), spring (26 percent), summer (16 percent), fall (33 percent). Do you prefer paintings of wild animals, like lions, giraffes or deer (51 percent), or domestic animals, like dogs, cats and other pets (27 percent)? Do you prefer larger paintings (41 percent) or smaller paintings (34 percent)? If large, would that be the size of a dishwasher (67 percent), a full-size refrigerator (17 percent) or a full wall (11 percent)? Do you prefer figures from a long time ago, like Lincoln or Jesus (56 percent), or more recent figures, like John F. Kennedy and Elvis Presley (14 percent)? Thinking back to the paintings of people that you have liked in the past, for the most part were the figures working (23 percent), at leisure (43 percent) or posed portraits (27 percent)? Which do you think you like better, a painting of one person (34 percent) or a painting of a group of people (48 percent)? Would you say that you prefer paintings in which the person or people are nude (3 percent), partially clothed (13 percent) or fully clothed (68 percent)? Do you prefer paintings predominantly of children (11 percent), women (6 percent), men (2 percent), doesn’t matter (77 percent)? Do you tend to favor paintings with sharp angles (22 percent) or with soft curves (66 percent)? (Paintings by Komar and Melamid) 50. The correlative problem—how to categorize bad art—is equally vexed. The Museum of Bad Art, a prankish institution that aspires to enshrine bad taste, has assembled a collection of meretricious paintings. These works, with curatorial comments, can be viewed online at http://www.museumofbadart.org/ 51. Richard Shusterman, “On the Scandal of Taste: Social Privilege as Nature in the Aesthetic Theories of Hume and Kant,” Philosophical Forum 20 (1989): 217.

ChAp Ter T wo 1. Throughout this work, I will be using the terms “aesthetic properties” and “aesthetic qualities” interchangeably to indicate purported properties or traits of objects. The phrase “aesthetic concepts,” which figures centrally in the article by Frank Sibley discussed in detail below, refers more naturally to mental and/or intentional entities. Though in many contexts these three phrases can be used interchangeably to refer to both aspects of objects and our schemes for denoting and categorizing them. 2. See Walton (1970). This article will be discussed in section 7 below.

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3. Theorists attending more closely to the workings of criticism complicate this scheme. For example, Noël Carroll identifies six levels of critical activity: description, classification, contextualization, elucidation, interpretation, and analysis, all culminating in a reasoned evaluation (Noël Carroll, On Criticism [New York: Routledge, 2009], 13–14, 84); Peter Lamarque offers a different but similarly complex schema involving: formal analysis, explication, elucidation, interpretation, and appreciation (Peter Lamarque, The Philosophy of Literature [New York: Blackwell, 2009]: chap. 4 passim). 4. Though there is debate about whether the relationship between levels is best characterized as supervenience, or as some looser causal connection. 5. Readers, listeners, viewers might well ascribe content to a work, unpack meaning, propose an interpretation, without first considering exactly which qualities are in place. I thank Noël Carroll for pressing me on this point. 6. See Paul Guyer’s Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on eighteenth- century German aesthetics. In his justly famed essay “Of the Modern System of the Arts,” Paul Kristeller characterizes Baumgarten’s contribution as a theory of sensuous as opposed to intellectual knowledge. 7. Though in one sense this is a gross simplification since not all works of art are singular physical entities. Consider the status of Brahms’s Third Symphony, J. K. Rowling’s first Harry Potter novel, or any wall painting by Sol LeWitt. 8. Frank Sibley, “Aesthetic Concepts,” in Approach to Aesthetics: Collected Papers on Philosophical Aesthetics (New York: Oxford, 2001), 1. Subsequent references to this essay will be cited parenthetically in the text. 9. Sibley admits that “aesthetic qualities ultimately depend upon the presence of features which . . . are visible, audible, or otherwise discernible without any exercise of taste or sensibility,” but he adds “what I want to make clear in this paper is that there are no non-aesthetic features which serve in any circumstances as logically sufficient conditions for applying aesthetic terms” (Sibley 2001: 3–4). Note that the first point just reiterates the relationship said to hold between levels one and two of the pyramid described above. The examples Sibley offers of perceptually discernible features are “curving or angular lines, colour contrasts, placing of masses, or speed of movement” (Sibley 2001: 3). Sibley does in the end allow that taste concepts can be negatively conditiongoverned, that is, the presence of certain features might rule out the applicability of a particular taste concept (Sibley 2001: 6) He offers the following example: “If I am told that a painting in the next room consists solely of one or two bars of very pale blue and very pale gray set at right angles on a pale fawn ground, I can be sure that it cannot be fiery or garish or gaudy or flamboyant” (Sibley 2001: 5). 10. While it might be tempting to suggest that fluency flags expertise, contrarians can argue that thoroughness and care can act as safeguards. If so, then sometimes labored judgments are more likely to be true than judgments that emerge rapidly and with great ease. 11. Here is the definition from the opening of the SEP entry on supervenience by: “A set of properties A supervenes upon another set B just in case no two things can differ with respect to A-properties without also differing with respect to their B-properties. In slogan form, ‘there cannot be an A-difference without a B-difference’.”

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12. Admittedly, many general terms can be vague, with problematic borderline cases. Two of the terms in my example might be subject to such worries. Is a particular patch of color pink or salmon? Is a surface with a large number of irregular perforations filigreed? I don’t believe that “curvilinear” generates equivalent worries in everyday life, though we might create problem cases by generating curves so mild that they lie below the threshold of perceivability with the naked eye. 13. Students of aesthetics might realize that a similar charge can be leveled against Clive Bell’s proposal that significant form is any arrangement of shapes and colors that triggers an aesthetic emotion in suitably sensitive observers. Who are they? Those who experience an aesthetic emotion in the presence of significant form. 14. “. . . an object which is described very fully, but exclusively in terms of qualities characteristic of delicacy, may turn out on inspection to be not delicate at all, but anaemic or insipid” (Sibley 2001: 7). 15. Since Sibley is in this context discussing negative condition-governing, the original quote speaks of rendering the initial aesthetic term inapplicable. I take it the overall point is that the presence of some features can cancel out (“outweigh”) the connections that would ordinarily hold between a set of non-aesthetic qualities and the aesthetic quality under consideration. 16. Alan Goldman, Aesthetic Value (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995), 40, 133. Subsequent references to this book will be cited parenthetically in the text. 17. Noël Carroll, The Philosophy of Art: A Contemporary Introduction (New York: Routledge, 1999), 190. I have substituted “qualities” for “properties” in reproducing this list. Carroll is assuming throughout that only anthropomorphic qualities can be expressed. Subsequent references to this essay will be cited parenthetically in the text. 18. The status of the central aesthetic term “beauty” might well turn on whether one believes candidate theories succeed in offering criteria that govern this category. I myself do not think any such proposals succeed. 19. The terminology is owed to Clifford Geertz. See Nick Zangwill, “The Creative Theory of Art,” American Philosophical Quarterly 32, no. 4 (1995): 317, and Robert Stecker, Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art: An Introduction (Lanham, MD: Roman and Littlefield, 2005), 65. I will say more about their respective accounts below. 20. I am thinking of Poussin’s many landscapes that include a path angling towards the horizon, for example, Landscape with Travellers Resting or Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake. With regard to poetry, consider Sonnet 116, which rhymes “love” with “remove” (lines 2 and 4) and “come” with “doom” (lines 10 and 12). These less than perfect rhymes break the established pattern and thereby command our attention. 21. Cf. this definition from Robert Stecker: “The property of being red is response dependent in case an object is red if humans with normal vision experience it as red (have red visual sensations) in daylight.” Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art: An Introduction, p. 64. While Stecker frames his discussion of aesthetic properties by contrasting normal perceivers and ideal observers, he undercuts the distinction when he proposes that “an ideal observer is simply a normal observer with . . . additional skills, a suitably skilled normal observer” (65). 22. Carroll, Philosophy of Art, 93.

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23. From a New York Times book review; Chiasson also noted that “the lack of punctuation implies something above or below ordinary speech: the hum of deep interiority, a chorus of ancestral voices, the music of the spheres.” 24. Time Magazine 2008. 25. Nick Zangwill, “The Creative Theory of Art,” American Philosophical Quarterly 32, no. 4 (1995), 307–23. Quotations from this paper will be cited parenthetically in the text. 26. Robert Stecker is one philosopher who has mounted effective challenges here. I will defer my discussion of his arguments until section 6 below. 27. The exact definition reads as follows: “F is an aesthetic feature of O if and only if F is an intrinsic feature of O and F is culturally identified as a property worthy of attention (i.e., or perception or reflection).” This formulation, from Aesthetics and the Good Life, is quoted on p. 391 of her paper “The Intrinsic, Non-Supervenient Nature of Aesthetic Properties” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 52:4 (1994). Subsequent citations to this paper will be flagged with the abbreviation INNA. In her 2001 Oxford University Press book Merit Aesthetic and Ethical, Eaton presents a similar definition but couched this time in terms of aesthetic properties rather than aesthetic features (11). 28. Eaton, INNA, p. 387. 29. Eaton, Merit Aesthetic and Ethical, 5. 30. Eaton, Merit Aesthetic and Ethical, 21. 31. She reports that her son, after hearing a performance of a Mahler symphony, exclaimed “Wasn’t it wonderful? Just when you thought it couldn’t get any louder, it did!” The video artist referenced is Bill Viola. Merit, p. 41 32. Berys Gaut, Art, Emotion and Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 33. Art, Emotion and Ethics, 34–35. Subsequent references to this book will be cited parenthetically in the text. 34. Noël Carroll, “Recent Approaches to Aesthetic Experience,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 70, no. 2 (2012): 171. 35. Gaut, p. 40. This is in the context of discussing his cluster concept theory of art. 36. “A vivid portrayal in one work might be the result of descriptions of characters that allow one to see them in one’s imagination acting and suffering in their fictional world; in another it might be a consequence of dialogue written with a perfect ear; in a third, it is produced by the powerful emotions the characters express; in a fourth, it is produced by the intimate voice of a first-person narrator. In all these cases, one has the impression of the characters ‘coming to life’”: p. 66 37. Some might claim that the view I go on to propose has more in common with another nonrealist option that Stecker rejects—relativism. The notion of critic clusters I set out in chapter 6 below is an attempt to evade radical relativism while acknowledging individual differences among appreciators. 38. Anna Bergqvist, “Thick Aesthetic Concepts: Giving Sibley His Due.” This paper which evolved from a conference presentation at the 2015 Eastern Division ASA, drew on her published pieces on moral particularism including “Thick Concepts and Context Dependence,” Southwest Philosophical Review 29, no. 1 (2013): 221–32; and “Why Sibley Is Not a Generalist After All,” British Journal of Aesthetics 50, no. 1 (2010): 1–14. On Bergqvist’s view, philosophers explaining the workings of thick aesthetic

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terms must explain how such concepts pick out a distinct kind, a coherent sampling of objective reality, without being reducible to a set of subvening natural properties and also have an evaluative force, that is, serve to support aesthetic verdicts. 39. Maurice Mandelbaum, “Family Resemblances and Generalization Concerning the Arts,” American Philosophical Quarterly 2, no. 3 (1965): 219–28. Reprinted in The Philosophy of Art: Readings Ancient and Modern, ed. Alex Neill and Aaron Ridley (New York: McGraw Hill, 1995). Citations in the text refer to this edition. 40. I acknowledge that Mandelbaum’s definitions are highly implausible; at the very least they’re way too broad. Prototype theory might prove a more promising way to explain the meaning of general terms. Such an approach distinguishes among exemplars and, for example, takes a robin to be a more typical bird than an ostrich. Thus robin-properties should figure more centrally in indicating the extension of the term “bird” than ostrich-properties. 41. Arthur Danto, “The Artworld,” Journal of Philosophy 61, no. 19 (1964): 580. 42. George Dickie, “What Is Art? An Institutional Analysis,” in Art and the Aesthetic (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1974), p. 34. 43. George Dickie, “The New Institutional Theory of Art,” in The Philosophy of Art: Readings Ancient and Modern ed. Alex Neill and Aaron Ridley (New York: McGraw Hill, 1995), p. 222. 44. Danto ascribes the view to Heinrich Wölfflin. See Arthur Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 44 and 112–13. 45. Historical theories of art like those proposed by Jerrold Levinson and Noël Carroll attend specifically to such differences and to what can vet avant garde works that initially shock and repel potential audiences. I will discuss these in some detail in chap. 4, sec. 11. 46. Arthur Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, 1. 47. Unlike most versions of this subject. See, for example, Nicolas Poussin, “The Crossing of the Red Sea,” from 1634. 48. “Kierkegaard comments that the result of his life is like that painting. All the spiritual turmoil, the father cursing God on the heath, the rupture with Regina Olsen, the inner search for Christian meaning,, the sustained polemics of an agonized sould, meld in the end, as in the echoes of the Marabor caves, into ‘a mood, a single color.’” Transfiguration, p. 1. 49. I hesitated as I wrote this sentence. Could two distinct works of art have all their aesthetic properties in common? Even if perceptually indistinguishable, the items would be different works because they were created with different intentions, because they inhabit different oeuvres, because they generate different patterns of influence, and so on. 50. In section II of his paper, Walton distinguishes standard, variable, and contrastandard aesthetic properties. The first are properties in virtue of which a work belongs to a given category, their absence would be disqualifying; the second are properties that don’t affect categorization—though they’re essential to determining the work’s features within the assigned category; the third are blocking conditions, they prevent a work from being in a particular category (339). Thus for a painting, being flat is a standard condition, having a specific array of surface shapes and colors is a variable condition— one determining what the painting is of, as well as how

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that subject is portrayed!—while having protruding three- dimensional object would be contra-standard (Walton cites this last example on p. 340.) 51. Noël Carroll, “Historical Narratives and the Philosophy of Art,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 51, no. 3 (1993): 323. 52. Elisabeth Schellekens, “Towards a Reasonable Objectivism for Aesthetic Judgements,” British Journal of Aesthetics 46, no. 2 (2006): 163–77. 53. I thank Jill Delston for pushing me to refine this point. She offered two examples of disagreements that can never be resolved despite there being a fact of the matter: whether god exists, and whether there googolplex+9 grains of sand in the world. 54. Jerrold Levinson, “Being Realistic about Aesthetic Properties,” 351. 55. Compare Berys Gaut’s cluster concept theory which proposes that works of art must fulfill at least some from this list of 10 functions: (1) possessing positive aesthetic properties, such as being beautiful, graceful, or elegant (properties which ground a capacity to give sensuous pleasure) (2) being expressive of emotion (3) being intellectually challenging . . . (4) being formally complex and coherent (5) having a capacity to convey complex meanings (6) exhibiting an individual point of view (7) being an exercise of creative imagination (being original) (8) being an artifact or performance which is the product of a high degree of skill (9) belonging to an established artistic form (music, painting, film, etc.) and (10) being the product of an intention to make a work of art. Berys Gaut, “Art as a Cluster Concept,” in Theories of Art Today, ed. Noël Carroll (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000), 28. Gaut takes care to establish that none of his listed conditions is necessary for something being a work of art, but some cluster/collection of one or more is, on his view, sufficient. 56. Recall the discussion of supervenience in sec. 2 above. 57. Danto, Transfiguration, 135, 125. 58. See his paper “Photography and Representation,” Critical Inquiry 7, no. 3 (1981): 577– 602. 59. He overlooked or discounted the range of initial choices photographers can make in setting up their shots as well as the further options available as they manipulate and print them, either digitally or through traditional darkroom methods. 60. Literary examples pose problems, as they engage readers’ imagination in ways that make it problematic deciding how to sort constitutive perceptual and aesthetic qualities. The special demands of this art form will be examined in the closing chapter. 61. Historical theories like those of Carroll and Levinson tell us how such connections might be understood. See Jerrold Levinson, “Defining Art Historically” British Journal of Aesthetics 19, no. 3 (1979): 21–33; Noël Carroll, “Historical Narratives and the Philosophy of Art,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 51, no. 3 (1993): 313–26.

ChAp Ter Three 1. “Of the Standard of Taste,” in Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Classics, 1985), 226–49. All subsequent quotations from this work will be cited parenthetically in the text.

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2. Though the conversion theory Hume introduces there to defuse the paradox of tragedy strikes me as anything but convincing! 3. Timothy M. Costelloe, “Hume’s Aesthetics: The Literature and Directions for Research,” Hume Studies 30, no. 1, (2004): 91. The remark is part of Costelloe’s presentation of Peter Kivy’s views. 4. Speaking of these examples, he claims: “When critics come to particulars, this seeming unanimity vanishes, and it is found that they had affixed a very different meaning to their expressions” (227). 5. I have no doubt that similar complaints could be lodged against the Bible and the Torah. 6. Wikipedia also notes that Teneriffe is the highest point in Spain and the world’s third highest volcano on an ocean island after Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa, both in Hawaii. 7. “A man in a fever would not insist on his palate as able to decide concerning flavors; nor would one affected with the jaundice pretend to give a verdict with regard to colors” (233). 8. I will not comment on the intervening segment where Hume compares and contrasts the possibility of general rules concerning what has been universally found to please with the likelihood that some artists—those with genius!—succeed by transgressing such formulations. Ariosto’s success is attributed to such an approach. I consider this a digression more relevant to accounts of artistic creativity than critical acumen. Though I grant these are to some degree correlative notions. 9. For brevity I will often, in the discussion that follows, refer to this trait simply as delicacy. 10. Of course, attention to work identity and individuation suggests that Hume misspeaks here. There is a clear sense in which, for the performing arts, the “very individual performance” cannot be more than once perused. But we can certainly on successive nights revisit the same production of a play, the same staging of a ballet, the same presentation of a symphony. I believe this captures what Hume had in mind. 11. Though the first sentence of this passage speaks of “discourse,” I take Hume to be addressing works of art rather than oratory. As noted earlier, literature was deemed the most worthy art in his time, and all the examples he presents in the Essay are from this realm. Thus the use of the term “discourse.” 12. “Of all speculative errors, those, which regard religion, are the most excusable in compositions of genius; nor is it ever permitted to judge of the civility or wisdom of any people, or even of single persons, by the grossness or refinement of their theological principles” (247). 13. See “Imagination and the Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 56, no. 2 (1998): 139–47. Brady reprises and enlarges on this suggestion in chapter 6 of her 2003 book Aesthetics of the Natural Environment (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press). The citations that follow refer to pages in that book. 14. Errol Bedford, “Emotions,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society LVII (1956–1957), 281–304; Anthony Kenny, Action, Emotion and Will (New York: Routledge, 1963);

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Robert Solomon, “Emotions and Choice,” Review of Metaphysics 27, no. 1 (1973): 20–41. 15. See Jenefer Robinson, Deeper than Reason: Emotion and its Role in Literature, Music, and Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Jesse Prinz, Gut Reactions: A Perceptual Theory of Emotion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). 16. For example, see “Art, Narrative, and Emotion” and “On Being Moved by Nature,” both reprinted in Beyond Aesthetics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 17. Etchings by M. C. Escher are examples of visual art depicting logically impossible situations. I’m sure there are equivalents in the narrative arts. 18. Peter Kivy, “Hume’s Standard of Taste: Breaking the Circle,” British Journal of Aesthetics 7, no. 1 (1967): 57– 66. 19. Kivy, 1967, p. 61. Kivy initially proposes a more general version of this charge, one that references all five critical traits, but soon scales back his claim and maintains that only practice and comparison are logically infected. 20. Cp. two variants of the paradox of fiction—the paradox of tragedy and the paradox of horror. The first asks why spectators willingly engage with works that generate negative emotions—Aristotle specified pity and fear. Noël Carroll’s parallel formulation of the paradox of horror asks why art-horror afficianadoes seek out works that generate fear and disgust. Since both genres thrive, the paradoxes cannot be genuine barriers to appreciation. 21. Peter Kivy, “Remarks on the Varieties of Prejudice in Hume’s Essay on Taste,” Journal of Scottish Philosophy 9, no. 1 (2–11): 111–14. 22. Kivy characterizes these differently, drawing from the writings of C.S. Lewis to contrast the Method of the Unchanging Human Heart with Historicism. But Kivy goes on to cite passages from Hume that aligns him with each of these approaches. 23. Assuming of course that we are not lacking as appreciators and that a work’s appeal to general human nature will register with us. 24. Noël Carroll, “Hume’s Standard of Taste,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 43, no. 2 (1984): 181– 94. 25. For example, the interpretive play of seeking “hidden meanings, symbols and themes,” the push to understand “the structural principles that make an artwork or part of one hang together,” the realization of ways “the structure of the artwork molds our experience of the work.” Carroll, “Hume’s Standard of Taste,” 186. 26. Carolyn Korsmeyer, “Hume and the Foundations of Taste,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 35, no. 2 (1976): 201–15. 27. In her paper, Korsmeyer distinguishes these three types: usefulness which flags the immediately practical, a broader notion of utility which indicates general benefit to society, and beauty of form, highlighting arrays of qualities associated with pleasurable or painful situations and eliminating all unstable, dangerous, or threatening combinations (208– 9). 28. Ted Gracyk, “Rethinking Hume’s Standard of Taste,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 52, no. 2 (1994): 169– 82. 29. On the opening page, Gracyk writes “Aspects of this discussion [of beauty and sentiment] suggest that Hume has a dispositional rather than a first-person analysis of taste.”

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30. I have borrowed some of this language from Gracyk’s p. 171 exposition of Hutcheson’s view. “Saying that something is ‘sweet’ or ‘hot’ implies that it regularly generates the appropriate sensation under normal conditions. So Hutcheson may think that judgments about beauty, like these other ideas, convey more than the speaker’s own disposition: there is an expectation that others are similarly disposed.”

ChAp Ter four 1. James Shelley, ‘Hume’s Double Standard of Taste,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 52, no. 4 (1994): 443. Subsequent quotations from this work will be cited parenthetically in the text. 2. Matthew Kieren, Revealing Art (New York: Routledge, 2005), 218. 3. Robert Stecker, Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art (Lanham, MD: Roman and Littlefield, 2005), 65. Though Stecker’s comments originate in a discussion of response-dependency, with special attention to color properties, he adds a footnote to say that the traits he ascribes to an ideal observer “derive from Hume’s . . . characterization of the ideal critic in ‘Of the Standard of Taste’” (p. 79, note 7). 4. Paul Guyer, “The Standard of Taste and the ‘Most Ardent Desire of Society,’” in Values of Beauty: Historical Essays in Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 72. Subsequent quotations from this work will be cited parenthetically in the text. 5. Roderick Firth, “Ethical Absolutism and the Ideal Observer,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 12, no. 3 (1952): 317–45. 6. Antonia Smith, “Reflections on the Nature of Perfection,” ESC: English Studies in Canada 39, nos. 2–3 (June/September 2013): 20–22 (Article). 7. In the literature they are referred to as both ideal critics and true judges; I prefer the former phrase. 8. See chapter 3 for an initial discussion of delicacy and p. 89 for further reflection on this point. 9. In Languages of Art (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968). The point arises in the context of realistic representation and again in the discussion of metaphor. For example: “Nor is resemblance necessary for reference; almost anything may stand for almost anything else” (5); “A schema may be transported almost anywhere” (74); “the simile cannot amount merely to saying that the picture is like the person in some respect or other; anything is like anything else to that extent” (77). The default comparison would be that both are being thought about by us now. Goodman never claimed that the shared properties would be interesting! 10. Cf. his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” Perspecta 19 (1982): 36–42. From paragraph 4: “No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone . . . you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. . . . What happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art that preceded it. . . . The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them.” 11. In mentioning non-art-related changes, I had in mind examples like the following. Our senses become less sharp, our moods more extreme—whether more cranky

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or more hopeful, plus our worldview is constantly readjusted in response to the flourishing or failure of our relationships and our changing ties to a larger social fabric. 12. Jerrold Levinson, “Artistic Worth and Personal Taste,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 68, no. 3 (2010): 225–33. Subsequent quotations from this paper will be cited parenthetically in the text. 13. Arnold Isenberg, “Critical Communication,” Philosophical Review 58, no. 4 (1949): 330–44. 14. See Jerrold Levinson, “Hume’s Standard of Taste: The Real Problem,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 60, no. 3 (2002); henceforth RP, p. 233; and Jerrold Levinson, “Artistic Worth and Personal Taste,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 68, no. 3 (2010); henceforth AW, p. 236. Subsequent references to these papers will be cited parenthetically in the text. 15. I thank Christopher Williams for clarification on this point. As Levinson says on p. 235 of RP, “the test of time is not proposed as a criterion of artistic value, but only as an important, yet entirely defeasible, indicator thereof.” 16. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, bk. 2, sec. 6, lines 15–22, trans. Martin Ostwald (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1992). 17. Morris Weitz, “The Role of Theory in Aesthetics,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 15, no. 1 (1956), p. 32. 18. Or artworlds, plural—we haven’t settled on principles of individuation for such entities. 19. Maurice Mandelbaum called for this approach in his paper “Family Resemblances and Generalizations concerning the Arts” American Philosophical Quarterly 2, no. 3 (1965): 219–28. 20. Levinson’s paper “Defining Art Historically” originally appeared in 1979 (British Journal of Aesthetics 19, no. 3: 232– 50); Carroll sets out his view in a pair of papers that both appeared in 1993—“Historical Narratives and the Philosophy of Art” (JAAC 51, no. 3 [313–26]) and “Identifying Art” (in Institutions of Art ed. Robert Yanal, Penn State University Press, 3–38). In the latter paper Carroll comments explicitly on Levinson’s historical theory. Subsequent references to that paper will be identified parenthetically in the text with the added label “IA.” 21. Jerrold Levinson, “Defining Art Historically” in Music, Art, and Metaphysics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 15. 22. “Defining Art Historically,” p. 11. 23. See for example Quine’s discussion of “Ralph believes that Ortcutt is a spy” in the paper “Quantifying In.” The upshot is that opaque contexts are those into which co-referential terms cannot be substituted salve veritate. They include belief and knowledge ascriptions, modal claims, and more. The notion plays a role in a much larger dispute between extensionalist and intensionalist approaches to logic/philosophy of language. But a great many philosophers employ considerably looser use of the transparent/opaque distinction, as evidenced by the fact that a topic search in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy offers up over 680 entries employing these terms. I thank John Martin for clarification of these matters. 24. Noël Carroll, “Historical Narratives and the Philosophy of Art,” in Beyond Aesthetics: Philosophical Essays (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 100–118.

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25. For example, “a better diagnosis of the project of the philosophy of art as we know it is that its underlying, though not generally explictly avowed, task has been to provide the theoretical means for establishing that the mutations issued from avant-garde practice belong to the family of art.” “Historical Narratives and the Philosophy of Art,” p. 102. See also pp. 104, 105. 26. It is not entirely clear whether Carroll, in his papers setting out his historical theory, should be seen as primarily tracking the art/non-art distinction, ie, as contributing to the debate about the classificatory sense of “art,” or as also sorting good from bad exemplars within the category of art, ie, as contributing to the debate about an evaluative sense of “art.” While Carroll explicitly voices hope that a correct account can point to why art is a valued human activity, I don’t believe he tells us how to rank works in terms of their greater or lesser value. Perhaps this can be accomplished considering the details of works’ identifying narratives. A more systematic Carrollian answer to this question should be sought in his subsequent 2009 monograph On Criticism. 27. Special provision would have to be made to accommodate outsider, primitive, or naïve artists. Their ability to produce what we count as art without awareness of the tradition in which they practice remains parasitic on that tradition in the sense that others can only declare their productions art by reference to it. So the existence of such outsiders doesn’t undermine the point Carroll is trying to make. 28. Richard Wollheim proclaims that art is essentially historical in section 63 of Art and Its Objects (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Arthur Danto makes a similar claim in The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), pp. 112–13, and credits Heinrich Wölfflin for the original insight.

ChAp Ter five 1. James Grant emphasizes the importance of critics’ ability to communicate effectively in his book The Critical Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 2. A reminder: works of art possess both aesthetic and nonaesthetic properties. Factual, descriptive, and structural properties are cited to support ascription of aesthetic qualities; historical and contextual properties also come into play. Aesthetic qualities are cited to support attribution of an interpretation. Interpretations figure centrally in supporting summary evaluations. Within this roughly pyramidal structure, claims on a given ‘level’ depend on claims a level below, though there is debate about whether the relationship between levels is best characterized as supervenience, or as some looser causal connection. 3. Chapter 3, p. 67. 4. Personal circumstances here would include sensory function, bodily health, state of mind; the broader external conditions would range from the physical aspects of the interaction to shared psychological and/or cultural factors relevant to taking in and evaluating a given work. 5. “Where men vary in their judgments, some defect or perversion in the faculties may commonly be remarked; proceeding either from prejudice, from want of practice, or want of delicacy; and there is just reason for approving one taste, and

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condemning another. But where there is such a diversity in the internal frame or external situation as is entirely blameless on both sides, and leaves no room to give one the preference above the other, in that case a certain degree of diversity is unavoidable, and we seek in vain for a standard by which we can reconcile the contrary sentiments.” “Of the Standard of Taste,” pp. 280– 81. 6. Goldman argues for nonrealism in his book Aesthetic Value and a number of subsequent papers. A recent and accessible summary of his position can be found in his essay “There Are No Aesthetic Principles” in Matthew Kieran’s anthology Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art (Hoboken, NJ: Blackwell, 2005). Jerrold Levinson defends a version of aesthetic realism in his paper “Aesthetic Properties, Evaluative Force, and Differences of Sensibility,” in Aesthetic Concepts: Essays after Sibley, ed. Emily Brady and Jerrold Levinson (Oxford: Clarendon, 2001). Subsequent references to this essay will be cited parenthetically in the text and flagged “APEF” where needed for disambiguation. Levinson refined his position in a recent Aristotelian Society paper “What Are Aesthetic Properties?,” reprinted in the latest collection of his papers. Contemplating Art: Essays in Aesthetics (New York: Oxford, 2006), 336– 51. Goldman and Levinson butted heads directly in a Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism (JAAC) symposium on realism (JAAC 52, no. 3 [1994]: 349– 56). 7. I agree with theorists like Jerrold Levinson and Nick Zangwill who maintain that aesthetic properties supervene on the base properties. For reasons that will emerge shortly in the discussion, Goldman believes that a weaker causal relation links the two levels. Peter Lamarque goes farther, urging us to enlarge the set of base properties to include “relational properties, of a historical, cultural, dispositional, or provenance-sensitive kind . . . [including] the artist’s intentions.” See “Aesthetic Essentialism,” in Aesthetic Concepts: Essays after Sibley, ed. Emily Brady and Jerrold Levinson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 104. I take up Lamarque’s view in greater detail in section 8 below. 8. For example, “It is because ideal critics can differ in taste that we must relativize our aesthetic judgments to those ideal critics whose taste we share.” Aesthetic Value, p. 38. 9. One might disparage Goldman’s definition as one of those typically unhelpful formalisms along the lines of: “A man M crossed a street S.” But the definition does establish these important points: aesthetic properties are flagged by the reactions they bring about in ideal viewers (Hume’s ideal critics), and they do so by acting through the base properties on which they causally depend. 10. “Ascriptions of more strongly evaluative and less objectively specific properties must be justified by appeal to less purely evaluative and more objectively specific properties. . . . This process of justification will continue under challenge until it arrives at objective relations, often formal relations, that ultimately ground evaluative responses.” Aesthetic Value, p. 23. The chain of justification eventually terminates in a set of base properties. See above. 11. Along similar lines, Stephen Burton has noted that delicacy would not be welcome in a triumphal arch. Levinson sums up this point more carefully as follows. “Aesthetic qualities cannot be said to entail evaluations, since it always seems possible to “approve a work for [say] its gaudiness . . . or despite its gaudiness” (APEF,

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p. 63); also because “the evaluative implications, loosely speaking, of terms like ‘gaudy’ . . . can be explicitly cancelled or disavowed without semantic anomaly” (63). I should add that most aestheticians who discuss aesthetic qualities agree that expressive qualities are not inherently evaluative. Whether a work is sad, or somber, or joyous, or angry says nothing about its overall worth, though it may of course predispose certain appreciators to like or dislike it. (See the discussion above of Hume on blameless differences.) 12. “First, it is surely not the case that all aesthetic impressions are inherently hedonically valenced. It rather seems that most such impressions are, for most perceivers, more or less hedonically neutral. . . . Secondly, even were all aesthetic impressions hedonically valenced, it would still be possible rationally either to approve or disapprove the affording of such an imporession at a particular point in a particular work” (APEF, p. 68). 13. He suggests they answer the question how, while various other basic metaphysical categories—people, places, times, causes— can be viewed as answers to similarly simple questions “who?” “where?” “when” “why” and so on. “What are Aesthetic Properties?” p. 5 (typescript provided by author). 14. Jerrold Levinson, “Being Realistic about Aesthetic Properties,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 52, no. 3 (1994): 354. 15. Dennett, Daniel, “Quining Qualia,” in Consciousness in Modern Science, ed. A. Marcel and E. Bisiach (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). Quotations that follow are drawn from a pdf of this paper posted at http://cogprints.org/254/1 /quinqual.htm. 16. Here, in more detail, are the two cases: Intuition pump # 7: The taste of coffee. Two coffee tasters, Chase and Sanborn, compare notes about their years on the job. Chase declares: “The coffee tastes just the same today as it tasted when I arrived. But you know, I no longer like it. My tastes have changed.” Sanborn replies, “Now I, like you, no longer care for the coffee we’re making. But my tastes haven’t changed; my . . . tasters have” (7). The example makes sense only if, when each participant speaks of his tastes, he is referring to his standards for judging the various coffees samples. Thus when Sanborn says “My tastes haven’t changed, my tasters have,” he is claiming that his standards (for goodness in coffee) have not shifted in his many years on the job, but he has come to think that the coffee has changed in taste. Intuition pump # 11: The cauliflower cure. “Someone offers me a pill to cure my loathing for cauliflower . . . . I take the pill and it works . . . but if I am asked which of the two possible effects (Chase-type or Sanborn-type) the pill has had on me, I will be puzzled, and will find nothing in my experience to shed light on the question. Of course I recognize that the taste is (sort of ) the same—the pill hasn’t made cauliflower taste like chocolate cake, after all—but at the same time my experience is so different now that I resist saying that cauliflower tastes the way it used to taste” (14). 17. There is one possibility that remains uncanvassed, namely that both the items’ taste and the tasters’ standards have changed. Dennett takes his series of destructive examples to show that any 1st-person claims about qualia can be discredited by noting that two factors—(1) the qualia themselves and (2) our judgments about them— contribute to that claim in proportions which we cannot ascertain. He con-

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cludes that there cannot be anything corresponding to the received view of qualia: as “properties of a subject’s mental states that are (1) ineffable (2) intrinsic (3) private, and (4) directly or immediately apprehensible in consciousness.” “Quining Qualia, web version, p. 4. 18. This suggestion does need to be complicated to accommodate cases where insipidity is called for and so intentionally put in place by an artist who knowingly creates an insipid character, an insipid passage in a painting, and so on. 19. Malcolm Budd, Values of Art: Pictures, Poetry, and Music (London: Penguin, 1995), 20. 20. One might buttress this claim by suggesting that ideal critics should be able to quite successfully judge the meaning and importance of works they don’t in fact like. Extreme prejudice might require a critic to recuse herself. By hypothesis, ideal critics are free from prejudice, so this worry is ruled out. Oughtn’t such critics be capable of judgments along the lines of “very good of its kind, though in general that kind is not to my liking . . .”? I will return to this point in section 11 below. 21. For example, Peter Lamarque, in “Aesthetic Essentialism,” uses Danto’s famous Red Squares example to effectively argue that aesthetic qualities inhere not in physical objects but in the works that emerge from them. He quotes Joseph Margolis’s tag, calling works of art “culturally emergent objects.” So my intuition about property possession would have to be extended to this somewhat rarified category, which nonrealists might be happy to compartmentalize in various respects. 22. See Susanna Siegel’s Stanford Encyclopedia entry “The Contents of Perception” as well as her paper “Which Properties are Represented in Perception.” 23. Peter Lamarque Work and Object: Explorations in the Metaphysics of Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 122. Subsequent quotations from this book will be cited parenthetically in the text. 24. For a fuller account of each, see the previous discussion, chapter 2, p. 51. 25. “Perceptual indiscernibility is true of the objects only prior to their being identified as works.” Lamarque, p. 131. Note that Lamarque is here discussing not Danto’s Red Squares but a related indiscernibility example, Walton’s guernicas. 26. Lamarque makes a similar claim in his paper “Aesthetic Essentialism.” See footnote 7. “If there is aesthetic supervenience, the supervenience base has to include relational properties, of a historical, cultural, dispositional, or provenance-sensitive kind (the latter involving, for example, an artist’s intentions),” p. 104. 27. Martindale, Colin, Kathleen Moore, and Jonathan Borkum. “Aesthetic Preference: Anomalous Findings for Berlyne’s Psychological Theory.” American Journal of Psychology 103, no. 1 (1990), pp. 53– 80. 28. Chatterjee and Vartanian support this point when they say, in their 2016 review article on neuroaesthetics “. . . by and large neuroimaging techniques generate correlational data. As such, when used in isolation, they do not allow one to make causal inferences about neural function. To do so, it is necessary to triangulate findings across multiple methodological approaches, including behavioral, electrophysiological, and lesion studies.” Anjan Chatterjee and Oshin Vartanian, “Neuroscience of aesthetics,” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1369 (“The Year in Cognitive Neuroscience” issue): 173. 29. See Richard Nisbett and Timothy Wilson, “Telling More than We Can Know: Verbal Reports on Mental Processes, Psychological Review 84, no. 3 (1977): 231– 59;

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R. B. Zajonc, “Attitudinal Effects of Mere Exposure,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology Monograph Supplement 9, no. 2 (1968): 1–27; James E. Cutting. “Gustave Caillebotte, French Impressionism, and Mere Exposure,” Psychonomic Bulletin and Review 10 (2003): 319–43; and Daniel Kahneman. Thinking Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2011.) 30. Matthew Kieran, “The Vice of Snobbery: Aesthetic Knowledge, Justification and Virtue in Art Appreciation,” Philosophical Quarterly 60, no. 239 (2010): 250. 31. While this may seem to be an instance of knowledge by acquaintance and thus something about which we can’t be misled (old-style paradigms about our knowledge of our own pain may seem to come into play here), Melchionne draws on Dan Haybron’s work on happiness and John Lambie and Anthony Marcel’s work on emotion avowals to suggest ways in which we can be mistaken even here. Kevin Melchionne, “On the Old Saw ‘I Know Nothing about Art but I Know What I Like,’” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 68, no. 2 (2010): 131–42. 32. In the end Melchionne endorses weak aesthetic fallibilism in lieu of out-and- out skepticism. 33. Consider Arthur Danto’s claim, in The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, that for art, esse est intepretari, or Noël Carroll’s fundamental posit, in On Criticism, that critics are in the business of delivering reasoned evaluations. 34. Helmut Leder, Benno Belke, Andries Oeberst, and Dorothee Augustin, “A Model of Aesthetic Appreciation and Aesthetic Judgments,” British Journal of Psychology 95 (2004): 489– 508; Rolf Reber, “Processing Fluency, Aesthetic Pleasure, and Culturally Shared Taste,” in Aesthetic Science: Connecting Minds, Brains, and Experience, ed. A. P. Shimamura and S. E. Palmer (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 223– 49; Anjan Chatterjee, “Prospects for a Cognitive Neuroscience of Visual Aesthetics,” Bulletin of Psychology and the Arts 4, no. 2 (2004): 55– 60; Arthur P. Shimamura, “Towards a Science of Aesthetics,” in Aesthetic Science: Connecting Minds, Brains, and Experience, 3–26; Nicholas J. Bullot and Rolf Reber, “The Artful Mind Meets Art History: Toward a Psycho-historical Framework for the Science of Art Appreciation,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 36, no. 2 (2013): 123– 80; Anjan Chatterjee and Oshin Vartanian, “Neuroscience of Aesthetics,” in Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences Issue: The Year in Cognitive Neuroscience 1369 (2016): 172– 94. 35. Oshin Vartanian and Vinod Goel, “Emotion Pathways in the Brain Mediate Aesthetic Preference,” Bulletin of Psychology and the Arts 5, no. 1 (2004): 37. 36. “Activation in right caudate nucleus decreased in response to decreasing preference ratings, with minimal activation for paintings with very low preference ratings. In contrast, activation in bilateral occipital gyri and left cingulate sulcus increased in response to increasing preference ratings, with maximal activation for paintings with very high preference ratings.” Oshin Vartanian and Vinod Goel, “Neuroanatomical Correlates of Aesthetic Preference for Paintings,” Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuropsychology 15, no. 9 (2004): opening abstract. 37. For example, thick conceptual content like the recognition that a particular array or aspect is delicate or insipid would presumably arrive with Chatterjee’s late stage of processing, or Leder’s explicit classification and cognitive mastery columns. But emotion enters in very differently in the two schemes. Chatterjee declares that evoked emotions are “aftermaths of object recognition” (“Prospects for a Cognitive

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Neuroscience of Visual Aesthetics”). An aesthetic emotion is one of the two outputs of his diagram, the other being aesthetic judgment. Leder instead posits a “continuous affective evaluation”; a horizontal line underlying the entirety of his chart represents the emotions that accumulate as the result of each processing stage. (See the chart on p. 492. Small pluses and minuses and the bottom of the column depicting each processing stage indicate the possibility that information travels forward with an emotional charge; presumably vector summation of the emotional output of the 5 stages generates the overall valence accompanying the resultant judgment.) In a later section titled Affective and Emotional Processing, Leder explains that “in our model there is a continuous development of changes in the affective state” (501). In short, different answers to our riddle seem to be built into the theoretical models proposed by Chatterjee and Leder; their illustrative boxology begs the question we seek to answer. 38. For instance, the analyses of aesthetic qualities proposed by Walton, Lamarque, and Eaton, and the definitions of art floated by Dickie, Danto, and Gaut. 39. In his singly authored paper in Aesthetic Science he observes that aesthetic judgments are “likely to engage neural circuits that are distributed widely” (303), and his 2016 co-authored paper states that “. . . the meaning-knowledge system has a relatively more distributed representation throughout the brain than do the emotion-valuation and sensory-motor systems” (179). Arthur P. Shimamura, “Towards a Science of Aesthetics” in Aesthetic Science: Connecting minds, brains, and experience ed. Arthur P. Shimamura and Stephen E. Palmer, Oxford University Press (2011), 3–26. 40. The term “cognitive stock” comes from Richard Wollheim. 41. Arthur P. Shimamura, “Towards a Science of Aesthetics,” 22. 42. For example, Jerome Lettvin’s 1959 paper “What the Frog’s Eye Tells the Frog’s Brain,” and David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel’s prize-winning work on vision in cats. 43. Chatterjee and Vartanian indicate that researchers can now generate virtual lesions! C&V, p. 186. 44. I first proposed this analogy in my 2012 paper “Comparing and Sharing Taste: Reflections on Critical Advice,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 70, no. 4: 367. 45. By “interest,” I mean the collection of conative states that generate rewarding engagement. I do not have in mind the notion of bias that figures in legal or moral cases and that prompts calls, in the aesthetic realm, for disinterested appreciation. 46. The topic of bad art further leavens this discussion. The painter Thomas Kinkade had thousands of followers and admirers. But the critics best situated to assess the self-styled “painter of light” may not have delivered paeans. 47. Presumably, it would be a type of work to which they were temperamentally or culturally suited, but not as successful as others in that set. Or, it may turn out that no successful work has yet been produced in a niche to which a given critic is inclined. 48. Many of the examples Levinson cites involve canonical works in the western artworld—for example, that the opening of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is dark and foreboding; that Austen’s Emma is witty and clever, that Rembrandt’s The Jewish Bride is heartfelt and tender, that Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie-Woogie is vibrant and exuberant; that Brancusi’s Bird in Space is sleek and elegant and more

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(Levinson APEF, p. 80). Agreement here follows from our discussion of the test of time. Some among his examples involve works that might not properly count as masterworks—for example, that Kirchner’s Street, Dresden is lurid and alienated, that Varèse’s Ionisation is raucous and irreverent, that Plath’s “Daddy” is bitter and ironic. Yet his ascriptions of aesthetic qualities seem persuasive here as well. Of course, Levinson’s list does not decide the realism debate; the account we have given of critical discourse leaves open the possibility of at least occasional disagreement among qualified and properly situated critics. 49. Thus any accurate account of our interpretive practice must allow for equally plausible competing accounts of such much- discussed examples as Henry James’s novella The Turn of the Screw, Hemingway’s novel The Sun Also Rises, Charlotte Perkins Gilmore’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Interestingly, these three examples each involve alternative construals of a given protagonist’s state of mind. In such instances, the multiple interpretability flows from our inability to know decisively what’s going on in another’s mind. Of course, the longstanding debate about authorial intention comes into play here as well. Michael Krausz is one philosopher who has vehemently defended multiplism. 50. Accrued through practice and comparison. 51. Whether critics who ascribe incompatible aesthetic qualities to a work are having qualitatively different perceptual experiences of (relevant aspects of ) the contested work is a question I consider irresolvable at this time. Jerrold Levinson and Peter Lamarque are theorists who take opposite stands on this issue. See the passage from Levinson quoted in footnote 48 above for a list of examples from Levinson grounding his faith in alignment; see Lamarque’s reworking of aesthetic empiricism discussed in section 8 above for account of when quality ascription can diverge.

ChAp Ter six 1. Though if there are instances of such standing preferences— critics who dislike sad story lines, or require meticulous musical structure, or favor bold and aggressive design—appeal to blameless differences could help resolve resulting disagreements. The Suitability Requirement might also be invoked to invalidate some responses. 2. See Richard Wollheim, “Pictorial Style: Two Views,” in The Concept of Style, ed. Berel Lang (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1979): 129–45. 3. David Lewis, On the Plurality of Worlds (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1986). See section 1.3 “Modal Realism at Work: Closeness.” 4. Reported in his piece “Sounds Like Bach,” available on the web. Hofstadter describes the products of EMI as “recombinant music.” He believes Cope’s program identifies and then reshuffles “recurrent structures” in the original pieces analyzed. But Hofstadter’s three gloomy conclusions—that Chopin, music, and the human mind are all “a lot shallower than I had ever thought”— err in not recognizing the essential human creative contribution, in two areas, namely: (1) the ur-music that Cope’s program analyzes and then mimics (the product of Chopin’s genius), and

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(2) the computer program EMI that so successfully captures the essence of each composer’s musical style (the product of Cope’s genius). 5. But recall Jerrold Levinson’s insistence, in the short concluding section of his paper “Aesthetic Properties, Evaluative Force, and Differences of Sensibility,” that “nothing precludes realist interpretation of aesthetic attributions, interpretation of them as assertibly true or false, in the majority of cases” (80). I cited some of Levinson’s twelve supporting examples—for example, that the opening of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is dark and foreboding, that Austen’s Emma is witty and clever, that Rembrandt’s The Jewish Bride is heartfelt and tender—in support of that discussion. 6. Berit Brogaard, “A Semantic Framework for Aesthetic Expressions,” in Semantics of Aesthetic Judgements, ed. James O. Young (Oxford: Oxford University Press: 2017), 121–39. 7. And have in fact toggled back and forth between viewing critic clusters as a mere heuristic and viewing them as capturing the way criticism in fact functions in actual artworlds. 8. Jerrold Levinson, “Hume’s Standard of Taste: The Real Problem,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 60, no. 3 (2002): 227–38. In what follows, quotations from this paper will be cited parenthetically in the text with the identifier “RP.” 9. Jerrold Levinson, “Artistic Worth and Personal Taste, “Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 68, no. 3 (2010): 225–33. In what follows, quotations from this paper will be cited parenthetically in the text with the identifier “AW.” 10. “It is because ideal critics can differ in taste that we must relativize our aesthetic judgments to those critics whose taste we share.” Aesthetic Value, p. 38. 11. Our discussion in Chapter Four of the arc of the identifying narratives at the core of Noël Carroll’s historical theory indicates difficulties that arise in trying to make this notion more precise. 12. Levinson inserts a qualifier here: “independently, if defeasibly, identified” (234). 13. Levinson characterizes the target group by citing “any nonideal perceiver content in her preference for Y.” 14. Recall the discussion of Kevin Melchionne’s paper “On the Old Saw ‘I Know Nothing about Art but I Know What I Like’” in the previous chapter. 15. Anna Christina Ribeiro, “Aesthetic Luck,” The Monist 101, no. 1 (2018): 99–113. Ribeiro’s paper is inspired by two famous essays on moral luck by Thomas Nagel and Bernard Williams; she seeks aesthetic equivalences to the moral claims made there. 16. See Ted Cohen, “On consistency in one’s personal aesthetics,” in Aesthetics and Ethics: Essays at the Intersection ed. Jerrold Levinson (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 106–25, Guy Damman and Elisabeth Schellekens, “On the Moral Psychology and Normative Force of Aesthetic Reasons,” Estetika 11, no. 1 (2017): 20–39, and Sheila Lintott, “Aesthetics and the Art of Friendship,” in Thinking about Friendship: Historical and Contemporary Philosophical Perspectives, ed. Damian Caluori (New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2013), 240– 59. 17. I have tried to sidestep this notion, insisting at several points that my overriding interest is the ascription of aesthetic qualities to works, as such qualities play a justificatory role in aesthetic debates and are also situated at ground zero for discussion of aesthetic realism.

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18. I leveled a similar charge in the previous chapter when I considered his claim that ideal critics, in light of their appreciation of masterpieces from the past, are also our best guides to present- day cutting- edge art. 19. Susan Feagin, “The Pleasures of Tragedy,” American Philosophical Quarterly 20 (1983): 95–104. 20. Recall the passage from “Artistic Worth and Personal Taste,” quoted earlier in chap. 4, where Levinson acknowledges the “myriad . . . aspects of our life situations—that guarantee that the actual appreciative behaviors of ideal appreciators will diverge. Thus, given five such ideal appreciators then while A is listening to, say, Vivaldi at home, B is listening to Björk in concert, C is contemplating Corots in the Louvre, D is in bed absorbed in Anita Brookner’s latest novel, and E, who has had a hard day at the office, is allowing herself an episode or two of Seinfeld or Sex and the City” (AW, p. 229). 21. I have set out Noël Carroll’s sevenfold listing of critical acts - description, classification, contextualization, elucidation, interpretation, analysis, evaluation— previously. In his book The Philosophy of Literature Peter Lamarque claims that literary appreciation requires answering the question “How does it work?” Explication and elucidation are components he includes in this task, where explication is “concerned directly with meaning” and focuses on “relatively localized parts” of works in contrast to elucidation which concerns “exploration of the immediate subject, or ‘world,’ of the work.” See Peter Lamarque, The Philosophy of Literature (New York: Blackwell, 2009), 141, 145. 22. J. Hillis Miller, On Literature (New York: Routledge, 2002), 25. 23. In Paul Guyer, Values of Beauty: Historical Essays in Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 37–74. 24. “It is also clearly part of Hume’s view that our appreciation of much art depends upon specific historical knowledge which could not be discovered by an ideal aesthetic observer but which must really be transmitted to posterity by an actual body of critics . . . the taste of the individual cannot be improved entirely by self-guided ‘practice’” (72, 73). 25. Noël Carroll, On Criticism (New York: Routledge, 2009), p. 188. Carroll goes on to explain: “In most cases, ranking the artworks in question seems beside the point. We want the critic to tell us what to be on the lookout for in a particular work.” 26. Remember the takeaway from Kendall Walton’s paper “Categories of Art,” discussed earlier, regarding the need to on occasion choose among competing candidate categories in assessing a work. 27. Ted Cohen, “Jokes,” in Pleasure, Preference, and Value, ed. Eva Schaper (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 120–36. 28. Goldman, Aesthetic Value, 17. Noël Carroll, Philosophy of Art (New York: Routledge, 1999), 190. Goldman offers powerful, stirring, amusing, hilarious, and boring as examples of this category; Carroll offers sublime, beautiful, comic, and suspenseful. 29. Keyed to differences in their accumulated experiences, their habits and conditioning, their passing moods, as well as where they fall on the outgoing-repressed continuum. 30. Jerrold Levinson, “What Is Aesthetic Pleasure?” in The Pleasures of Aesthetics: Philosophical Essays (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 6.

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31. Certainly aesthetic properties can be attributed immediately, without supporting inference. One “just sees” that the painting is sad, “just feels” that the poem is bombastic. If asked for justification, retrospective reconstruction would be in order. 32. See section 2 above.

ChAp Ter seven 1. For example, Allen Carlson, “Appreciation and the Natural Environment,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 37, no. 3 (1979): 267–75; Noël Carroll, “On Being Moved by Nature: Between Religion and Natural History,” in Beyond Aesthetics: Philosophical Essays (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 368– 84; Emily Brady, “Imagination and the Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 56, no. 22 (1998): 139–47. 2. In making this claim I follow the lead of such writers as Michael Nelson and William Cronon. In his article “Rethinking Wilderness: The Need for a New Idea of Wilderness,” Nelson remarks that “Contrary to the purist idea, wilderness has actually always been a matter of degree.” “Rethinking Wilderness: The Need for a New Idea of Wilderness” in Environmental Ethics: Concept, Policy, Theory ed. Joseph DesJardins (Mountain View, CA, Mayfield, 1999), 3. Cronon defends a similar position in his paper “The Trouble with Wilderness or Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (New York: Norton, 1995). 3. These were among the requirements included in early definitions of nature by such writers as Bob Marshall and Aldo Leopold! See the opening section of Michael Nelson’s paper cited above. 4. See Robert Elliot, “Faking Nature,” Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 25, no. 1 (1982): 81–93. Stephanie Ross, “Paradoxes and Puzzles: Appreciating Gardens and Urban Nature,” Contemporary Aesthetics 4 (2006). https://contempaesthetics .org/newvolume/pages/article.php?articleID=400&searchstr=Stephanie+Ross. 5. Granted, primitive peoples allegedly read the natural world as filled with portents. The Argument from Design considers nature an intricate marvel that proves the perfections of its creator, and even today we might deem a day auspicious because of its fine weather or read a rainbow as a sign of good luck. But cultural and religious traditions that explicitly endorse such equivalences do not command universal assent. 6. For Brentano, intentionality is a way of being directed at something. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy quotes the turgid passage in which he introduces this term: “Every mental phenomenon is characterized by what the Scholastics of the Middle Ages called the intentional (or mental) inexistence of an object, and what we might call, though not wholly unambiguously, reference to a content, direction toward an object (which is not to be understood here as meaning a thing), or immanent objectivity.” Pictures, paragraphs, and mental states are all intentional in Brentano’s sense because they all refer beyond themselves; nature does not have this property. 7. Allen Carlson, “Aesthetic Appreciation of the Natural Environment,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 37, no. 3 (1979): 267–75.

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8. This feature is foregrounded in the environmental aesthetic proposed by Arnold Berleant; see Art and Engagement (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991), and The Aesthetics of Environment (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992). 9. Carlson, “Appreciation and the Natural Environment,” 273. 10. Here again is his proposed taxonomy for aesthetic qualities: (1) value qualities (beautiful, ugly, sublime, dreary), (2) formal qualities (balanced, graceful, concise, loosely woven), (3) emotion qualities (sad, angry, joyful, serene), (4) evocative qualities (powerful, stirring, amusing, hilarious, boring), (5) behavioral qualities (sluggish, bouncy, jaunty), (6) representational qualities (realistic, distorted, true to life, erroneous), (7) second- order perceptual qualities (vivid, dull, muted, steely, mellow), and, finally, (8) historical qualities (derivative, original, daring, bold, conservative). See his book Aesthetic Value (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1995), 17. His value and formal qualities can also be applied to nature. 11. Noël Carroll, “On Being Moved by Nature: Between Religion and Natural History,” reprinted in Beyond Aesthetics: Philosophical Essays (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 368– 84. 12. He says, “Being moved by nature remains a way of appreciating nature that may coexist with the environmental model” (380). 13. See Brady, The Aesthetics of the Natural Environment (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2003), 150– 61. 14. Note that this aligns with the view generally accorded to Arnold Isenberg, who claimed in his well-known article “Critical Communication” that critics get us to see as they do: “It is a function of criticism to bring about communication at the level of the senses, that is, to induce a sameness of vision.” Arnold Isenberg, “Critical Communication,” reprinted in Art and Philosophy, ed. W. E. Kennick (New York: St. Martin’s, 1979), 663. 15. John Burroughs, “The Art of Seeing Things” reprinted in Nature, Aesthetics, and Environmentalism, ed. Allen Carlson and Sheila Lintott (New York: Columbia University Press 2008), 76– 85. 16. Burroughs, p. 81. 17. Along the way readers can sample pieces by renowned naturalists and nature lovers—John James Audubon, Charles Darwin, Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, Aldo Leopold—but also savor contributions by past and present- day crusaders, artists, and authors of renown—Walt Whitman, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Virginia Woolf, Ursula Le Guin, Alice Walker, Annie Dillard, Barbara Kingsolver, and more. See The Norton Book of Nature Writing, ed. Robert Finch and John Elder (New York: Norton, 2002). 18. There are interesting examples from the realm of art that offer additional ways of embracing nature. Some works are not merely about nature, they also take nature as their medium. Consider the ephemeral environmental constructions of Andy Goldsworthy. In selecting, shaping, binding together bits of nature—assemblages of rocks, or leaves, or icicles— Goldsworthy encourages us to be more aware of our surroundings, more attuned to the ways component parts can be arranged and of the further ways those assemblages can come apart. Christo and Jeanne Claude’s temporary incursions into the landscape—Running Fence, Valley Curtain, Surrounded Islands—prompt us to think of how the introduction of new elements

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affects and alters an existing scene. The total dismantling of their creation two weeks in invites comparison with the different and generally much slower varieties of natural change. 19. Though I grant there could be wrong ways of admiring each of these! 20. We attend visually to actors’ movements, expressions, and gestures as well as to costumes, props, and sets; we listen to tone of voice, rhythm of speech, background music, and more 21. In his 1960 book ee cummings: the art of his poetry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1960), Norman Friedman says of the poem “r-p- o-p-h- e-s-s-a-g-r”: “the spatial arrangement is not imitative in itself, as is the case in representational painting or drawing in which the lines and colors actually resemble some object; it is rather that the spacing is governed by the disruption and blending of syllables and the pause and emphasis of meaning which produce a figurative equivalent for the subject of the poem, as the reader reads in time” (123–24). By contrast, Sam Hynes calls it “a picture of an action rather than a description of it” and adds: “word-clusters representing each part of the action (take- off, leap, landing) are to be received simultaneously, not as words occurring one at a time.” “Cummings’ Collected Poems, 276.” Explicator 10 (November 1951): Item 9. 22. To confirm this, consider the effect of poetry composed and read aloud in languages we don’t understand! 23. I believe Jerrold Levinson introduces a more permissive approach when outlining his so-called ludic option in the paper “Intention and Interpretation in Literature.” See The Pleasures of Aesthetics: Philosophical Essays (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 175–213. 24. Interestingly, the stock examples of multiple interpretation that most readily come to mind are cases that involve alternative construals of a given protagonist’s state of mind. In such instances, the multiple interpretability flows from our inability to know decisively what’s going on in another’s mind. 25. Though we do often serve as our own DJs and select music to serve as a background to all manner of moods and life tasks. Here too we might not award the music our full attention. 26. Interestingly, Ted Nannicelli, in his book Appreciating the Art of Television (New York: Routledge, 2017) , notes the singular way that works of television art can be temporarily extended. Since he believes such works can include not only single episodes but also seasons and/or entire series, he points to “various ways in which television’s temporal prolongation affects our engagement with it” (132). 27. Note that similar remarks apply to listening to classical music! 28. Lamarque distinguishes literary critics from Johnsonian common readers as follows: “The literary critic is simply a reader who has more experience and heightened perceptiveness than the ‘common reader’; the critic is further along the path toward David Hume’s ‘true judges.’” Peter Lamarque, The Philosophy of Literature (New York: Blackwell, 2009), 135. 29. Though as Aristotle insists, most do have a beginning, a middle, and an end. 30. In a footnote to his book on Meinongian Logic: The Semantics of Existence and Nonexistence (Boston: De Gruyter, 1996), p. 102, Dale Jacquette attributes the first of these questions to John Woods’s book The Logic of Fiction (1974).

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31. Painters can perhaps convey some of this through facial expression, bodily posture, carefully detailed settings. We “read” the paintings based on our knowledge of how to “read” our conspecifics. 32. Kendall Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990); Kathleen Stock, Only Imagine: Fiction, Interpretation, and Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017). 33. Jenefer Robinson, “Style and Personality in the Literary Work,” Philosophical Review 94, no. 2 (1985): 233. Here is a fuller version of that passage: Henry James uses negatives, abstract nouns, etc., to comment on Strether’s bewilderment and to characterize Strether’s attitude to Waymarsh . . . negatives, abstract nouns, non-transitive verbs, elegant variation, and so on . . . are all elements of [James’s] style because they all contribute to the expression of his personality and attitudes . . . using these particular verbal elements, James thereby describes Strether’s state of consciousness in a particular judicious, abstractive, expository way and thereby expresses his own “subjective and abstractive tendency,” his interest in the relations between minds (Strether’s, the narrator’s, the reader’s), his moral sensitivity, and his cool and judicious intellect. 34. I also think the fact that much of the intimate action is off-stage, hinted at obliquely rather than spelled out, contributes to the density of his narratives and the difficulty of decoding them. 35. Noël Carroll, “The Power of Movies,” Daedalus 114, no. 4 (1985): 79–103. 36. Katherine Thomson-Jones. Aesthetics and Film, Continuum, 2008. 37. Jenefer Robinson, “On Being Moved by Architecture,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 70, no. 4 (2012): 337– 53. Subsequent quotations from this paper will be cited parenthetically in the text. 38. Robinson intends this term to apply in the technical sense coined by psychologist J. J. Gibson. 39. Compare Frederick Greenwood’s completion of Mrs. Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters after her death with the embellishment that generated Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (Seth Grahame-Smith, 2009). The latter generates an entirely new literary work. 40. Proposals by Derek Walker and Norman Foster, Michael Graves, and Rem Koolhaus were all shot down; eventually the museum relocated to a more spacious building designed by Renzo Piano in the meatpacking district. Note that most of the names on this list are illuminati of modern architecture. 41. From the web-report https://news.artnet.com/art-world/dana-schutz-painting -emmett-till-whitney-biennial-protest-897929. For another take on this controversy, see Amanda Fortini’s review of Zadie Smith’s essay collection Feel Free: “From Justin Bieber to Martin Buber, Zadie Smith’s Essays showcase her Exuberance and Range,” New York Times, February 21, 2018. 42. See https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/how-scarlett-johansson-and -dwayne-johnson-represent-hollywoods-uneven-strides-toward-inclusivity/2018 /07/22/22b5665 8– 8dd 8–11e8-bcd 5– 9d911c784c38_story.html 43. Ironically, Tambor was fired from the show when allegations of sexual harassment surfaced after four seasons.

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44. See his July 22, 2018, article “How Scarlett Johansson and Dwayne Johnson represent Hollywood’s Uneven Strides Toward Inclusivity.” https://www.washington post.com/lifestyle/style/how-scarlett-johansson-and- dwayne-johnson-represent -hollywoods-uneven-strides-toward-inclusivity/2018/07/22/22b5665 8– 8dd 8–11e8-bcd 5– 9d911c784c38_story.html. 45. James Young, “Profound Offense and Cultural Appropriation,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 63, no. 2 (2005): 135–46; and Cultural Appropriation and the Arts (New York: Wiley, 2010). Quotations from “Profound Offense” will be cited parenthetically in the text and flagged with the letters PO. 46. Shaun Nichols and Stephen P. Stich, Mindreading: An Integrated Account of Pretence, Self-Awareness, and Understanding Other Minds (New York: Oxford, 2003). At one end of the continuum lie theory-theories which Nichols and Stich characterize as information rich. Such accounts suppose that we come to understand others— ascribe beliefs and predict behavior—by formulating general claims about what individuals think and say and how they act in various situations. These are the “theories” of folk psychology. At the other end of the continuum, simulation theories instead assume that we first imaginatively put ourselves in others’ shoes, then try to determine their beliefs and predict their behavior by running our own decision procedures offline. This computer trope (“offline”) flags the fact that we don’t change our pre- existing beliefs or initiate actions of our own while plumbing another’s mind. So- called hybrid theories borrow aspects from both of these extremes, explaining some capacities in terms of theory possession, others in terms of offline simulation programs. Alvin Goldman recognizes a similar range of competitors when defending a simulationist view in his book Simulating Minds: The Philosophy, Psychology, and Neuroscience of Mindreading (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). 47. Nichols and Stich note that their conception fleshes out David Marr’s computational level of cognition, the highest of the three levels he proposes. It sits atop the algorithmic level and the physical implementation level in his scheme (10). 48. This disclaimer about the spatial localization of the associated functions suggests we shouldn’t look to empirical work by psychologists and cognitive scientists to confirm or refute Nichols’s and Stich’s claims. And we certainly shouldn’t expect that, for example, imaging experiments will answer the main problem posed in this section—whether critics can understand and assess works produced by artists very unlike them. 49. One interesting exception might be beliefs generated by trompe l’oeil art, as here the artists are trying to deceive us, get us to believe that the fictional content they present is real. 50. See note 46. 51. In a number of papers Peter Carruthers discusses empirical work that has a bearing on mind-reading. Some of the experiments he mentions study what he calls the “aspectuality” of perception. Subjects are shown a scene involving an avatar and asked whether he can see one or two of the presented blips, whether he sees a certain figure as a 6 or a 9, and so on. The features of perception explored here—point of view, object orientation—are in play in our imagined ascription to Jill. However, the relatively impoverished nature of the states of mind attributed to the avatars

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suggests that these experiments will do little to illuminate critical understanding of complex plots in the various narrative arts. 52. A reductio ad absurdum argument attacks a claim by showing that taking it to be true leads to a contradiction. Since contradictions are never true, the initial assumption must be rejected. 53. Thomas Nagel, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?,” Philosophical Review 83 (1974): 435– 50. Nagel’s main goal was to establish that reductionist accounts of our mental life cannot accommodate the subjective character of experience and thus leave consciousness behind. 54. Heidi Maibom, “The Space Between.” An introductory chapter from a forthcoming book on perspective-taking, provided by the author in a private communication. Maibom introduces her topic by describing the predicament of Shakespeare’s heroine Hermia from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Hermia’s father has chosen for her a husband she does not love. Hermia responds with the declaration “I would my father look’d but with my eyes.” This becomes Maibom’s taking- off point for a study of perspective taking. Borges comes into play when Maibom explores Pierre Menard’s understanding of Cervantes. And Descartes is relevant because of his skeptical account that distinguishes our knowledge of self from our knowledge of others. 55. Marilyn Frye, The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory (Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press, 1983), 4– 5. 56. The painting was featured as a cover for the Saturday Evening Post on September 20, 1958. 57. Joel Rudinow, “Race, Ethnicity, Expressive Authenticity: Can White People Sing the Blues?” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 52, no. 1 (1994): 127–37. 58. The worries about harm stem in part from claims that violent demeaning language and violent images prompt unwelcome attitudes and real-world imitation. 59. The participants were Elizabeth Burns Coleman, Shen-yi Liao, Erich Hatala Mattes, Alexis McLeod, Matthew Strohl, Olufemi O. Taiwo, and James Young. See https:// aestheticsforbirds.com/2018/08/22/artworld-roundtable-is-cultural-appropriation -ever-okay/#more-7748. 60. Nicki Minaj might be an interesting example to insert into the discussion, as she seems to be a successful black female in this field. 61. Roundtable participant Shen-yi Liao frames the debate in terms of power as opposed to identity, and he references Linda Martin Alcoff who maintains “whether it is responsible to speak for a group that is not one’s own depends on the particular context of one’s speaking-for and, ultimately, whether one’s speaking-for is allied with or against the relevant systems of power in the background.” See “The Problem of Speaking for Others” posted at alcoff.com. 62. Explanations of how such music acquires content can be complex; relevant factors might include borrowed themes with cultural significance, recurrent motifs, thwarted expectations, and vicarious journeys through tonality! Some theorists posit a persona to explain the insertion of emotional content. But once we marry music and words, the capacity to create characters and plot is clearly present, and with this comes the invitation for mind-reading that penetrates the fictional world. 63. From a September 11, 2018, interview with New York Times senior movies editor

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Mekado Murphy titled “Viola Davis on What The Help Got Wrong and How She Proves Herself.” 64. Suzanne Keen, Empathy and the Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). 65. Martha Craven Nussbaum, “Flawed Crystals: James’s The Golden Bowl and Literature as Moral Philosophy,” New Literary History 15, no. 1 (1983): 25– 50. 66. Ironically, those maids probably attained impressive knowledge of the world of their employers. There’s an epistemic asymmetry in place, since those with less power and privilege have to negotiate the world of the dominant class—for example, to procure and retain jobs—while there is no reciprocal obligation in the other direction. 67. Tom Stankowicz and Marie Jackson. The Museum of Bad Art: Art Too Bad to be Ignored (Kansas City: Andrews and McMeel, 1996), 98– 99. 68. For example, Rotten Tomatoes, and Golden Raspberries or Razzies. 69. Peter Travers, “The Disaster Artist Review: James Franco Takes on Worst Movie Ever—and Wins,” Rolling Stone, November 27, 2017. Travers closes his review with the claim that Franco “hits a new career peak as actor and director by making sure his film is as heartfelt as it is hilarious.” 70. See Anthony Savile, “Sentimentality,” reprinted in Arguing about Art: Contemporary Philosophical Debates, 2nd edition, ed. Alex Neill and Aaron Ridley (New York: Routledge, 2002), 315–19. Savile declares ringingly, “Sentimentality is always open to criticism. There is always something wrong with it” (315). 71. And for good art as well. 72. Dwight Garner, “Review: In Robert Hughes’ ‘The Spectacle of Skill,’ An Aesthete’s Unsparing Eye,” New York Times, December 3, 2015. 73. James Elkins, What Happened to Art Criticism? (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003), 6. 74. And his opening image brings to mind Arthur Danto’s withering assessment of restaurant review style criticism, see my Introduction. 75. Dale Peck, Hatchet Jobs: Writings on Contemporary Fiction (New York: New Press, 2004). 76. This accumulation of opprobrium is a reminder that we should always weigh whether negative reviewers are correct in their pot shots. 77. At times the decision about meanness can be made more pragmatically by considering the venue in which the criticism will appear. For example, space constraints within a journal might weigh against publishing unduly harsh reviews; the audience would be better served by reviews of worthy works rather than by pieces excoriating works without value. If such constraints are not an issue, then perhaps some mean (though not uninformed, misleading, or totally defamatory) reviews should be acceptable.

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Index

academic critics, 4 Addison, Joseph, 62– 64, 66, 97, 152 aesthetic appreciation, 3, 17, 29, 61, 75, 131–32, 152, 154, 156– 58, 164; and expertise, 129; individuality, retaining of, 155; like-mindedness, 153, 155 aesthetic disagreement, 29 aesthetic empiricism, 120–22, 129 aesthetic experiences, 125–26, 145 aesthetic judgment, 108; proper circumstances for, 67, 109 aesthetic luck: circumstantial, 142; constitutive, 142; luck in upbringing, 142; sociogeographic, 142 aesthetic non-realism, 6, 107, 117–18 aesthetic preferences, 122–23; and appreciation, 124–25; and emotion, 126–27; emotion, appraisal theory of, 127; empirical research on, 3; and privilege, 27; as promiscuous, 123; and status, 27; top-down processing, 126–27 aesthetic qualities, 3, 30, 34, 37–44, 47–48, 51, 53– 56, 73, 80– 81, 107, 116, 119–20, 122, 127, 139, 155, 156, 210n30, 213n9, 231n31; aesthetic dispute, 110; appreciators’ response to, 123; behavioral, 33; as contestable, 31, 108; context-dependence of, 52; and delicacy, 128–29, 135; disagreement, 138; evocative, 33; formal, 33; as higher ways of appearing, 113; historical, 33; ideal critics, 132–33; and insipidity,

128, 135; of nature, 166; perceptual, 29, 169–70; representative, 33; Scope Restriction, 110, 112; second- order, 33; taxonomy for, 232n10; value, 33 aesthetic realism, 53– 55, 111, 113–14, 132, 157, 229n17; critical disagreement, 117–18, 130 aesthetics, 45; and ethics, 44; nonrealism in, 107, 111; philosophical views of, 43; realism in, 107– 9, 111 Albers, Joseph, 50 Alcoff, Linda Martin, 236n61 Amadeus (film), 97 amateurs, 90, 104, 109, 134, 139, 196; critical advice, benefiting from, 140, 145–46, 153; juvenilia, 135, 140–41; maturity, 135, 140–41 Ambassadors, The (James), 174 Andrews, Travis M., 184 anti-aesthetic art, 197 Appleton, Jay, Prospect-Refuge theory, 168 appropriationist art, 198 architectural aesthetics, 178 architecture, 159– 60, 169; architectural improvement, 180– 81; ideal critic, 182; ocularcentric experience, 178–79; practical purposes, 179; and suitability, 180 Argument from Design, 231n5 Aristotle, 15, 48, 86, 95, 100–102, 219n20, 233n29

246

i ndex

arousal potential, 122 Arp, Jean, 101 art: as autobiographical, 74–75; as communication, 48; continuity of regard, 98–100; emotions, role of in, 74; as expression, 48; as imitation, 48; as significant form, 48 art appreciation, 166; courses, 5; cultivating friends, 143–44; native and nonnative luck, 166; nature appreciation, 162– 63, 167– 68 art criticism, identity politics, 182– 83 art museums, 181– 82 artworld, 49, 198, 200, 202; essentialist theories of, 48, 55– 56, 162; family resemblance, 48; and innovation, 96; intra-artworld, 50; and originality, 96; as term, 50 Athens (Greece), 82 attentional effort, 123 Audubon, John James, 232n17 Austen, Jane, 156, 174, 227n48, 229n5 authenticity, 7, 134, 140, 154, 157, 193; indistinguishability, 153; and individuality, 149, 151– 53, 155 Authenticity Problem, 154– 55 Authentic Performance Practice movement, 99 Azalea, Iggy, 192 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 34, 57– 58, 99 Bach, Kent, 12, 210n26; blind tasting, 21, 210n32; sensory v. cognitive pleasures, 20 bad art, 3, 7, 227n46; criteria of, 197– 98; mean critics, 160, 195, 199, 201, 237n77 Baird, Robert, 200–201 Baker, Nicholson, 83 barometers, critics as, 40, 140 Barthelme, Frederick, 198 Battleship Potemkin (film), 176 Baumgarten, Alexander, 30, 213n6 Beardsley, Monroe, 207n9 Beatles, the, 150 Beattie, Ann, 198 Beckmann, Max, 57 Bedford, Errol, 73

Beethoven, Ludwig van, 91, 99, 227n48, 229n5 Bell, Clive, 48, 214n13 Bergqvist, Anna, 48, 215n38; aesthetic qualities, 47; shapelessness, 47; variability, 47 Berlyne, Daniel, 122–23 Bernini, Gian Lorenzo, 101 Big Bang Theory, The (television show), 2–3 Binkley, Timothy, 58, 197 Bird in Space (Brancusi), 227n48 Birkhoff, George David, 122–23 Björk, 230n20 Black, Hannah, 183 blameless differences, 81– 82, 90, 107, 109, 112, 114, 116–17, 120, 122, 127, 130, 140, 146, 157, 201 blind tasting, 21, 210n32 Bordwell, David, 4 Borges, Jorge Luis, 190, 236n54 Bottrall, Ronald, 97 Boulton, Robert, 22 Boulud, Daniel, 10 boundary crossings, 192; ethics of, 191 Bourdieu, Pierre, 8, 27 boxology, 187–89 Brady, Emily, 161, 166, 173, 218n13; ampliative imagining, 73, 165; exploratory imagining, 73, 165; projective imagining, 73, 165; revelatory imagining, 73, 165 Brahms, Johannes, 97, 213n7 Brancusi, Constantin, 101, 227n48 Brentano, Franz, 162, 231n6 Breuer, Marcel, 181 Brillat-Savarin, Jean Anthelme, 12 Britain, 62 Broadway Boogie Woogie (Mondrian), 227n48 Brochet, Frédéric, 24–25 Brogaard, Berit, 139 Brookner, Anita, 91, 230n20 Brooks, Cleanth, 4 Brown, Michael, 191 Budd, Malcolm, 116 Bullot, Nicholas, 125 Bulwer-Lytton Contest, 196

i ndex Bunyan, John, 64, 66, 152 Burning Rods (Kiefer), 58, 59 Burroughs, John, 166– 67 Cage, John, 58 Calvino, Italo, 83 Carlson, Allen, 161, 165; Landscape Model, 162– 63; Object Model, 162– 63; science and common sense, 163– 64, 166 Carroll, Noël, 6, 29, 36, 43, 45, 52, 74, 78–79, 83, 98, 120, 147–49, 160– 61, 165– 66, 177, 207n9, 208n14, 213n5, 214n17, 216n45, 217n61, 219n20, 221n20, 222n26, 222n27, 226n33, 230n25, 230n28; aesthetic qualities, 33; aesthetic revelation, possibility of, 117–18; best-explanation-style argument, 117–18; character qualities, 33–35; consumer reporters v. tastemakers, 4; critical activity, levels of, 213n3, 230n21; critical comparisons, misplaced emphasis on, 151; emotion qualities, 33–34; expressive properties, 33; gestalt qualities, 33; historical theory, 100–102, 229n11; narrative adequacy, determining of, 102; nonanthromorphic qualities, 33; reaction properties, 33–34, 155; reaction set, 35; reasoned evaluation, 4, 92– 93, 168, 198, 213n3, 226n33; taste qualities, 33; variable framing, 175–76 Carruthers, Peter, aspectuality, 235n51 causal laws, 137 Cervantes, Miguel de, 236n54 Chatterjee, Anjan, 125–27, 129–30, 225n28, 226n37, 227n43 Chernobyl, 59 Chiasson, Dan, 36–37, 215n23 Christo and Jeanne-Claude, 232n18 Church, Frederic, 163 Civil Rights Trail, 194 Clementi, Muzio, 97 Cohen, Ted, 3, 142–43, 153, 183– 84 Cole, Thomas, 163 Coleman, Elizabeth Burns, 236n59 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 167 Collingwood, R. G., 48, 74

247

Coltrane, John, 91 compositionality, and knowability, 14 comprehensive critics, 91 conformity, 157 consciousness, 189 consumer critics, 6 Consumer Reports (magazine), 11 contemporary art, appreciation of, 83 context, 123 contextualism, 29 contextualizing criticism, 5 Coombs, Amy, 22–23 Cope, David, 137, 228n4 Copernican Revolution, 28, 68 Corot, Jean-Baptiste-Camille, 230n20 Costelloe, Timothy, 62, 218n3 creativity, and imagination, 74–75 critical advice, 3, 6–7, 30, 61, 81, 105, 134, 144, 158– 59; amateurs, benefiting from, 140, 143, 153; downstream results of, 153; and elitism, 8; leveling, concerns about, 8; reshaping taste, 149, 152 critical assessment, 8, 92, 95, 104, 137, 186, 192, 199; “hot” and “cool,” 129 critical disagreement, 3, 6, 90, 106, 107– 8, 115–16, 130, 132–33, 135, 140, 217n53; aesthetic qualities, 138–39; aesthetic revelation, possibility of, 117–18; different sources of, 109; external hindrances, 61, 67, 109; among ideal critics, 109, 112, 114; internal disorders, 67, 109, 148; Millian Requirement, 131; Scope Restriction, 131, 138–39; Suitability Requirement, 131 Critical Presbyopia, 200–201 critical standing, 17 critical tasks: and Beardsley, 207n9; and Carroll, 4, 92, 213n3; and Lamarque, 171–72, 213n3 critical taste, 27 Critic Clusters, 6, 134–35, 137–39. See also shared taste criticism, 4; after-the-fact consultation, 147; interpretation, as main task, 4 critics: anointing of, 26; consumer reporters, 4; taste makers, 4; types of, 4 Croce, Benedetto, 48, 74

248

i ndex

Cronon, William, 231n2 culinary tourism, 11 cultural appropriation, 184, 191– 92; critics role, 193– 95 Cummings, E. E., 170 Currie, Gregory, 72, 120 Cut Piece (Ono), 58 Cutting, James E., 124 “Daddy” (Plath), 227n48 Dallas Buyer’s Club, The (film), 184 Damman, Guy, 142–43 Daniel (restaurant), 10 Danish Girl, The (film), 184 Danto, Arthur, 28, 49, 53, 98, 120, 222n28, 226n33, 237n74; esse is interpretari, 57; historicity of art, 50; Red Square, 51, 121, 225n21, 225n25; restaurant-review style criticism, 5– 6 Darwin, Charles, 232n17 Davis, Viola, 193 de gustibus non est disputandum, 9, 11, 66 de Kooning, Willem, 57 delicacy: as foundational, 87, 89; of taste or imagination, 68– 69, 88– 89, 115, 120, 132, 136, 149 Delston, Jill, 217n53 Dennett, Daniel, 115–16, 224n16, 224n17 Derbyshire, David, 23–24 Descartes, René, 73, 75, 190, 236n54 developmental arc, 89– 90, 127 Dickens, Charles, 197 Dickie, George, 28–29, 53, 98; artworld, 49– 50 Dieckhaus, Larry, 207n3 Dillard, Annie, 232n17 Disaster Artist, The (film), 196 Disaster Artist, The (Sestero), 196 division of labor, 26 Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot (film), 184 Du Bos, Jean-Baptiste, 62– 63 Duchamp, Marcel, 50, 58, 197 Eastman School of Music, 137 Eaton, Marcia, 29, 38, 50, 215n27; aesthetic qualities, as intrinsic features, 40–44; boundary issues, 40

Ebert, Roger, 1, 3, 207n1, 207n3 ecofeminism, 16 egalitarianism, 26 Ekman, Paul, 73 Eliot, T. S., 89, 97 elitism, 6, 8, 27–28 Elkins, James, 200 Eminem, 192 Emma (Austen), 227n48, 229n5 emotions, 73–74 empathy, 145, 185, 194 empirical research, 3, 40, 129; factor analysis, 123–25; fMRI studies, 126, 128; forced choice, 123; imaging studies, 126, 128; preference studies, 122–24, 126 Enlightenment, 26, 62 Enquiry concerning Human Understanding (Hume), 62 Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals (Hume), 62 Erased De Kooning Drawing (Rauschenberg), 197 Escher, M. C., 219n17 essentialist theory, 49, 162; antiaesthetic, 56, 58, 197n1; expression, 48, 56– 57; formalist, 57; imitation, 57; mimetic, 56 Experiments in Musical Intelligence (EMI), 157 expertise, 9, 17–21, 25–26, 44, 87, 91, 104, 131–32, 161, 166, 188, 202; and appreciation, 129 expression theories, 56 Eysenck, Hans, 122–23 factor analysis, 123–24 faiblesse, 154– 55, 157 familiarity, 123 Feagin, Susan, 145 Fechner, Gustav, 122 Ferguson (Missouri), 191 film, 26, 159, 169–70, 173, 178; accessibility of, 160, 177; attention- controlling devices of, 176; deeper meaning, 177; montage, 176; multitasking, 176–77; power of, 175; repeatability of, 177–78; uniqueness of, 175

i ndex

249

fine art, 16 Firth, Roderick, Ideal Observer (IO), 85, 90 flavor, 9, 22, 23, 208n10; and aroma, 25; v. taste, 12, 24 Floating Figure (Lachaise), 101 Florence (Italy), 50 folk psychology, 235n46 Follett, Ken, 153 food: and hotness, 12; as minor art, 209n22; texture of, 12; taste, touch, or smell, 13 foodies, 11, 208n6 Foster, Norman, 234n40 Fountain (Duchamp), 197 Franco, James, 196, 237n69 freedom from prejudice, 70, 77, 88 Friedman, Norman, 233n21 friendship analogy, 142–44, 148 Frye, Marilyn, 191 Frye, Northrup, 4

Goya, Francisco, 197 Gracyk, Theodore, 62– 63, 80, 219n29, 220n30 Grant, James, 195, 222n1 Graves, Michael, 234n40 Greenberg, Clement, 58 Greenblatt, Stephen, 4 Greenwood, Frederick, 234n39 Grossman, Lev, 37 Guernica (Picasso), 52 gustatory taste, 3, 6, 16, 30; art, as counterpart to, 8; basic flavors, 11–14, 22, 209n18; as debased, 13; foodies, 11, 208n6; neophobia, 10; new foods, children’s distaste for, 9–10; objectivity of, 17; and olfaction, 13; picky eating, 10; received view, 11; relativism in, 25; as response- dependent, 15; and scent, 13–14; smell and touch, 12; taste buds, 12, 211n36; and tongue, 12 Guyer, Paul, 84, 148–49

Garner, Dwight, 199 Gaskell, Elizabeth, 174 Gaut, Berys, 38; aesthetic qualities, 43– 44; artistic theory of aesthetic, 42–43; cluster concept theory, 217n55 Gendler, Tamar, 77–78 Gibson, J. J., 234n38 Gilmore, Charlotte Perkins, 170–71 Godel, Vinod, 104, 126, 129 Godfather, The (film), 196 Golden Bowl, The (James), 193– 94 Goldman, Alan, 6–7, 36, 110, 113–15, 118, 122, 127, 134–35, 141, 155, 164, 230n28; aesthetic qualities, 33; aesthetics, non-realism in, 107, 111–12; behavioral qualities, 34–35; emotion qualities, 34; evocative qualities, 35; formal qualities, 34; historical qualities, 35; hyena interrupting Mozart, 32; perceptual properties, 29; representation category, 35, 56– 57; shared taste, 140 Goldman, Alvin, 235n46 Goldsworthy, Andy, 232n18 Gombrich, Ernst, 4 Goodman, Nelson, 88– 89; replete, 172 good sense, 71

Haddon, Mark, 154 Hagel, Jenny, 184 Hawking, Stephen, 184 Haybron, Dan, 226n31 Help, The (film), 192– 93 Help, The (Stockett), 186, 192– 94 Hemingway, Ernest, 170–71 Herbert, George, 170 Hermeren, Goran, 33 high intensive salience, 123 hip hop, 192 historicity of art, 102 Hofstader, Douglas, 137, 228n4 Homage to the Square canvases (Albers), 50 Homer, 82, 94 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 97, 232n17 Hudson River School, 163 Hughes, Robert, 36, 199–200 Hume, David, 8– 9, 54, 73, 75, 91, 98, 103, 106, 111, 121, 129, 148, 152, 159, 168, 171, 218n2, 218n8, 218n10, 218n11, 219n29; aesthetic appreciation, 61; aesthetic judgment, 61; approbation, 63; beauty, analysis of, 63, 66, 76, 79– 80; blameless differences, notion of, 81– 82, 90, 107, 109, 112, 114,

250

i ndex

Hume, David (continued) 116–17, 120, 122, 127, 130, 140, 146, 157, 201; British aesthetics, contributor to, 62; and circularity, 76; common sense, 64; and comparison, 69–70, 76, 79, 82, 86–89, 177, 194– 95, 199; critical disagreement, 108– 9; critics of, 55, 76–78, 83–85, 90, 105; delicacy of taste, 68– 69, 78–79, 82, 87– 88, 109, 115, 132; disapprobation, 63; dispositional theory, 80– 81; Don Quixote anecdote, 68, 84; essential traits of good critic, and collective scarcity, 71; evaluative disagreement, 65– 66; external hindrances and internal disorders, 67, 109; freedom from prejudice, 70, 77, 195, 201; good sense, 70–71; good taste, 27; ideal critic, 3, 6, 27–28, 61, 81– 84, 87, 89– 90, 94– 95, 100, 102, 105, 108– 9, 115, 127, 131–32, 135–36, 140, 169, 173, 199, 202, 220n3; ideal critic, traits of, 68–72, 76, 105; and inconsistency, 76; and objectivity, 64, 79; and practice, 69– 70, 76, 79, 82, 86– 89, 177, 194– 95, 199; sentiment-based theory, 92; shared standards, 61, 64, 145–46; subjectivity, 61, 64; test of time, appeal to, 81– 83, 94, 96– 97, 132; true judges, as perfections, 84–85, 233n28; and variation, 109 Hutcheson, Francis, 62– 63, 80, 220n30 Hutchins, Max O., 21, 210n35 ideal critics, 93, 96– 97, 116, 141–42, 145, 158; aesthetic qualities, 132– 33; aesthetics, realism in, 107; and architecture, 182; comparison, 61; critical disagreement, 109, 112, 114; delicacy of imagination, 61; freedom from prejudice, 61; good sense, 61; hierarchy of, 158; and Hume, 3, 6, 27–28, 61, 81–84, 87, 89– 90, 94– 95, 100, 102, 105, 108– 9, 115, 127, 131–32, 135–36, 140, 169, 173, 199, 202, 220n3; practice, 61; as redundant, 78; similar taste, 137–38; Suitability Requirement,

130–31; taste, differing in, 111–12; taste, elevation of, 146–47; traits of, 61, 68, 71, 91– 92, 131–32 Ideal Observer, 136 identity, determinants of, 182 identity politics, 7, 160, 188– 89; art criticism, 182– 83 imagination, 72–73, 165, 170, 173, 178, 180, 215n36; and creativity, 74; and emotion, 74 imaginative fluency, and emotional responsiveness, 72, 173 imagining, 72, 120, 132, 166, 174, 194; modes of, 73, 165, 173 Inception (film), 177 indistinguishability, 149, 153– 54 Industrial Revolution, 26 Infinite Jest (Wallace), 174 inherent qualifications, 149 Institutional Theory of Art, 49 intentionalism, 173 intentionality, 231n6 internet, leveling effects of, 3 intersubjectivity, 11 Ionisation (Varese), 227n48 Isenberg, Arnold, sameness of vision, 93 Jackson, Frank, 209n12 Jacquette, Dale, 233n30 James, Henry, 170–71, 174–75, 193– 94, 234n33 James, William, 74 Japan, 50 Jewish Bride, The (Rembrandt), 227n48, 229n5 Jewish Museum, 179 Jim Crow, 194 Johansson, Scarlett, 184 Johnson, Dwayne “The Rock,” 184 Johnson, Samuel, common reader, 172, 233n28 journalistic critics, 4, 6 Joyce, James, 200 junk science, 24 justificatory structure, 6, 29, 108, 144, 168, 222n2 juvenilia, 89, 135, 140–41, 152

i ndex Kafka, Franz, 156 Kahneman, Daniel, 124 Kandinsky, Wassily, 58 Kant, Immanuel, 28, 68 Keen, Suzanne, on empathy, 186– 87, 193– 94 Kellogg, Mary, 207n3 Kenny, Anthony, 73 Kiefer, Anselm, 58– 59 Kieran, Matthew, 84, 124 Kierkegaard, Søren, 51, 216n48 Kingsolver, Barbara, 232n17 Kinkade, Thomas, 153, 197, 227n46 Kirchner, Ernst Ludwig, 227n48 Kiss, The (Rodin), 101 Kivy, Peter, 76, 218n3, 219n19, 219n22; circulatory charges, 77 knowledge of other minds, 185, 187, 189– 90 Komar and Melamid, 8, 26–27, 212n49 Koolhaus, Rem, 234n40 Kooser, Ted, 200–201 Korsmeyer, Carolyn, 8, 15, 79– 80, 208n9, 219n27; objectivity of gustatory taste, hierarchy of, 11, 13, 16, 30; Taste v. taste, 12, 30, 208n8 Krausz, Michael, 228n49 Kristeller, Paul, 213n6 Kuhn, Thomas, 164 Kurosawa, Akira, 177 Lachaise, Gaston, 101 Lamarque, Peter, 6, 120–22, 147, 171, 213n3, 225n21, 225n25, 225n26, 228n51; academic v. journalistic criticism, 4; formal analysis, 172; on literary critics, 233n28; on practice of reading, 172 Lambie, John, 226n31 landscape, emotional response to, 165 landscape appreciation, 73, 163– 65, 168– 69 Lange, Carl, 74 Lange, Dorothea, 198 Langer, Suzanne, 56, 74 LaPietra, Donna, 207n3 La Rivière (Maillot), 101 Leavis, F. R., 97

251

Leder, Helmut, 125, 226n37 Le Guin, Ursula, 232n17 Lehrer, Adrienne, 19–20 Leopold, Aldo, 231n3, 232n17 Leto, Jared, 184 leveling, 8, 26, 28, 82 Levellers, 11n44 Levine, Sherry, 198 Levinson, Jerrold, 3, 6–7, 81, 90, 94, 102– 5, 110, 115, 118, 122, 127, 131–32, 134, 142, 146, 149, 158, 196, 216n45, 217n61, 221n15, 221n20, 227–28n48, 228n51, 229n5, 230n20, 233n23; aesthetic properties, 155– 56; aesthetics, realism in, 107, 111, 113–14; Authenticity Problem, 154– 55; comprehensive ideal critic, 91; continuity of regard, 98–100; convergence, and overlap, 153; critical advice, 140; equivalence classes, 91, 140, 150– 54, 157; faiblesse, maintaining of, 154– 55, 157; as higher ways of appearing, 113; Indistinguishability Problem, 153– 54; inward aesthetic responses, 156– 57; new works of art, attraction to, 148; and projection, 96; and regards, 98–100; response- dependency, 54– 55; satisfaction, measuring of, 144–45; summary value, 144; Test of Time, 141; transparent v. opaque regards, 99–100 Levittown, 178 Lewis, David, and possible worlds, 137 LeWitt, Sol, 213n7 LHOOQ (Duchamp), 197 Liao, Shen-yi, 236n59, 236n61 Libeskind, Daniel, 179, 181– 82 like-mindedness, 135, 145; and appreciation, 153– 54 Lintott, Sheila, 143 literature, 26, 159, 169–71, 173, 175; effect of, 174; fiction, paradox of, 219n20; indeterminacy of, 172, 188; as mind expanding, 193– 94; novel reading, 193– 94 litmus paper, critics as, 104, 140 Locke, John, 14, 62– 63, 66 Logan, William, 200–201

252

i ndex

London (England), 82 Los Angeles (California), 50 Lugosi, Bela, 196 Maibom, Heidi, 186– 87; on perspective taking, 190, 194, 236n54 Maillot, Aristide, 101 Malevich, Kasimir, 197 Malick, Terence, 177 Mandelbaum, Maurice, 48–49, 53, 216n40, 221n19 Marcel, Anthony, 226n31 Margolis, Joseph, 225n21 Marr, David, 125; and cognition, 235n47 Marshall, Bob, 231n3 Martin, John, 210n34 Martindale, Colin, 122–23 Mary Boone Gallery, 199 Maslin, Janet, 192– 93 Mason, Bobbie Ann, 198 Matisse, Henri, 51 Matrix, The (film), 177 Mattes, Erich Hatala, 236n59 maturity, 135, 140–41, 150 McKibben, Bill, 167 McLeod, Alexis, 236n59 McRaney, David, 24 mean critics, 7; bad art, 160, 195, 199, 201, 237n77 meaningfulness, 123 Melchionne, Kevin, 124, 226n31, 226n32 Menard, Pierre, 236n54 Merwin, W. S., 36–37 Metamorphosis, The (Kafka), 174 metaphor, 35, 220n9; birdwatching, 93, 166; role of, 36 Meyer, Leonard, tension and release theory, 58 Meyers, Seth, 184 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A (Shakespeare), 236n54 Mill, John Stuart, 83; on higher quality pleasures, 103 Miller, Alexander, 53– 54 Miller, J. Hillis, power of opening sentences, 147–48, 156 Millian Requirement, 102, 105– 6, 131, 139, 154, 158; ratchet model, 103–4, 155

Milton, John, 64, 66, 152 mimetic theory, 56 Minaj, Nicki, 236n60 mind-reading, 185– 87, 189, 195, 235– 36n51; as perspective-taking, 190 modernism, 178 Mondrian, Piet, 227n48 Monell Chemical Senses Center, 23–25 Monet, Claude, 97 Moore, Henry, 101 Moore, Marianne, 36, 180 moral luck, 229n15 Most Perfect Painting project, 26 Mothersill, Mary, 94 Movie Review Query Engine (MRQE), 2 movie trailers, 5 Mozart, 57, 152 Muir, John, 232n17 multitasking, 174, 176–77 Museum of Bad Art (MOBA), 195– 96, 212n50 Museum of Innocence, The (Pamuk), 174 Museum of Modern Art, 196 music, 236n62 Nagel, Thomas, 189, 229n15, 236n53 Nannicelli, Ted, 233n26 nature: aesthetic properties of, 166; v. culture, 161 nature appreciation, 160– 61, 169; art appreciation, 162– 63, 167– 68; imaginative responses to, 165– 66; sight, sense of, 167 NCIS (television show), 176 Nelson, Michael, 231n2 neo-Humean theory, 3, 6, 8, 28, 61, 108, 129, 134, 144, 150, 161 neophobia, 10 Netflix, 2, 137, 211n47 neuroaesthetics, 225n28 New York City, 50 Nichols, Shaun, 186, 235n47, 235n48; boxology, 187– 89; Possible Words Box (PWB), 187– 88, 190– 91; theorytheories, 235n46; Updater, 188 Nichomachean Ethics (Aristotle), 95 Ninth Symphony (Beethoven), 227n48, 229n5

i ndex Nisbett, Richard, 124 Noble, Ann C., 18 Nolan, Christopher, 177 Noland, Kenneth, 57 non-realism, 6, 107 Nussbaum, Martha, 44, 193– 94 objectivity: attack on, 81; and expertise, 18–20; and knowledge, 18, 20 oenophiles, 11, 16–17, 24, 35 “Of the Standard of Taste” (Hume), 61– 67, 71, 75–76, 79– 83, 92, 94, 105– 6, 108, 116–17, 168, 202 Ogilby, John, 64, 66, 152 olfactory responses, 24 Olsen, Regina, 216n48 On Criticism (Carroll), 92 Ono, Yoko, 58 “On Tragedy” (Hume), 62 Open Casket (Schutz), 183 open criticism, 26 Opening Soon at a Theater Near You (television show), 1, 207n1 oppression, 191 originality, 35, 122, 198 Pallasmaa, Juhani, 178–79 Palmer, Stephen E., 122–23 Pamuk, Orhan, 174 Paris (France), 50, 82, 97 Parker, Robert, 210n32 Paul Clifford (Bulwer-Lytton), 196 peak-shift, 123 Peck, Dale, 200 personal identity, 157, 185 personification, 35 Philosophy of Art, The (Carroll), 117 Phoenix, Joaquin, 184 Piano, Renzo, 234n40 Picasso, Pablo, 52 Pissaro, Camille, 97 placement and orientation, 123 Plan 9 from Outer Space (film), 52, 196 Plath, Sylvia, 227n48 Plato, 15, 26, 48, 73, 165, 172 poetry, 170–71, 180 Pontormo, 57 Porter, Eliot, 169

253

Possible Worlds Box (PWB), 187– 88, 190– 91 Potel, Nicolas, 18 Pound, Ezra, 36, 97 Poussin, Nicolas, 34, 214n20 practical criticism, 2, 4– 5, 7, 139, 160, 201–2 Preference Sets, 136–37 Pride and Prejudice (Austen), 188 Prinz, Jesse, 74 prototype theory, 216n40 prototypicality, 123 psychophysics, 122 Quine, W. V. O., 99, 221n23 Ramachandran, V. S., 122–23 rap, 192 Rashoman (film), 177 Rauschenberg, Robert, 58, 197 Ray, Janisse, 167 reading, constitutive tasks of, 147 realism, 6, 25 Reber, Rolf, 125 Redmayne, Eddie, 184 regards: cognitive content, 100; individuating, 98; transparent v. opaque, 99 relativism, 25, 90– 91, 215n37 Rembrandt, 227n48, 229n5 Renoir, Pierre-Auguste, 97 Republic (Plato), 26 response dependency, 46, 55 restaurant-review style criticism, 5– 6 Ribeiro, Anna, 146, 166, 229n15; aesthetic luck, 142 Robinson, Jancis, 210n32 Robinson, Jenefer, 74, 174–75, 178–79, 234n33, 234n38 Rockwell, Norman, 191, 197 Rodin, Auguste, 101 Romantic poets, 167 Rome (Italy), 82 Room, The (film), 196 Rosen, Charles, 4 Rothko, Mark, 57– 58 Rotten Tomatoes, 2 Rowling, J. K., 213n7 Rub and Tug (film), 184

254

i ndex

Rudinow, Joel, 191– 92 Ruffin, Amber, 184 Runaway, The (Rockwell), 191 Salieri, Antonio, 97 Salle, David, 36, 199–200 Saturday Evening Post (magazine), 197 Savile, Anthony, 237n70 Schellekens, Elisabeth, 54, 142–43 Scholastics, 231n6 Schutz, Dana, 183, 185, 191 Scope Restriction, 110, 112–13, 131–32, 136, 139 Scruton, Roger, 17, 21, 57; winespeak, disparaging of, 19 Seinfeld (television show), 230n20 senses, 12–14, 69, 93, 113, 119–20, 167, 169–70, 220–21n11, 232n14; chemical, 21, 209n11; men v. women, 15–16; paired categories of, 15 sentimentality, 197, 237n70 Sestero, Greg, 196 Sex and the City (television show), 196, 230n20 Shakespeare, William, 4, 34, 190, 197, 236n54 shared taste, 106, 133–35; as symmetric matter, 140. See also Critic Clusters Sharps, Amy, 192– 93 Shelley, James, 84– 86 Shimamura, Arthur, 127; I-SKE model, 125 Shiner, Larry, 181– 82 Shusterman, Richard, 8, 27, 81 Sibley, Frank, 29, 36, 38, 40, 42–43, 56, 110, 113; aesthetic concepts, 30, 166, 212n1; aesthetic disagreement, 37; aesthetic qualities, 3, 31–33, 213n9; aesthetic taste, 30; non- conditiongoverned, 30–32, 37, 47, 214n15; perceptual objectivism, 54; taste or perceptiveness, 30–32, 44–45 Sierra Club, 169 simplicity, 64, 122 simulation theory, 185 Siskel, Gene, 1, 3, 207n1, 207n3 Skyscraper (film), 184 smell, 12–13, 15, 22–25; chemical senses,

21, 209n14; and flavor, 208– 9n10; secondary objects, 17; and taste, 209n11 Smith, Adam, 26 Smith, Barry, 17–20 Smith, Murray, 178 Snow, C. P., 178 Society of Independent Artists, 197 Solomon, Robert, 73 Spanish Civil War, 52 spatial localization, 235n48 Spinoza, Baruch, 73 Stecker, Robert, 84, 214n21, 215n26, 220n3; aesthetic/non-aesthetic distinction, 45; aesthetic properties, 46–48; relativism, rejection of, 215n37; response dependency, 47, 54– 55, 220n3; specific value properties v. general value properties, 34 Steinberg, Sybil, 192– 93 Steinberger, Mike, 24–25, 209n14 Stella, Frank, 57 Stich, Stephen, 186, 235n47, 235n48; boxology, 187– 89; Possible Worlds Box (PWB), 187– 88, 190– 91; theorytheories, 235n46; Updater, 188 St. Louis Art Museum, 59 Stock, Kathleen, 173 Stockett, Kathryn, 192– 93 Stravinsky, Igor, 97 Street, Dresden (Kirchner), 227n48 Strohl, Matthew, 236n59 Stuffed Owl, The, 196 subject appropriation, 185– 86 Suitability Requirement, 6, 107, 134, 139, 142, 146, 152, 158, 160, 200–201, 228n1; as gatekeeper, 135; temporally/ culturally suited, 130–32, 157; work types, relation to, 186, 192, 195 Sullivan, Louis, 178 Sun also Rises, The (Hemingway), 170–71 supertasters, 15, 24; acuity, genetic basis of, 14 supervenience, 29, 31, 39–42, 48, 55, 113, 128, 138, 156, 213n4, 213n11, 222n2, 225n26 Taiwo, Olufemi O., 236n59 Tambor, Jeffrey, 184, 234n43

i ndex taste: and art, 9; chemical causes of, 23; determinants of, 16; v. flavor, 12, 24; as frivolous, 12–13; gustatory, 209n18, 209n22; hedonic inflection of, 12–13; irrationality of, 10; objective aspects of, 11, 16; paradox of, 80; phenomenological dimensions of, 21; physiological dimensions of, 21; and pleasure, 12; and proximity, 13; received view of, 11, 16; scientific take on, 21–25; sense of, 12–13, 15–16; and smell, 21; as subjective, 79 taste experience, 14, 20; cognitive penetrability of, 24; and knowledge, 20–21 taste receptors, 21–22 tastes, secondary objects, 17 Tasting Note Aids, 18 Telfer, Elizabeth, 209n22 terroir, 11 Test of Time, 139, 141; Levinson, dimensions of, 94, 96 theatre, 49, 170 Theory of Everything, The (film), 184 theory-theory, 185 thick aesthetic properties, 34, 38, 47, 53, 132, 139, 215n38 Thomson-Jones, Katherine, 176–77 Thoreau, Henry David, 232n17 Till, Emmett, 183, 191 Todd, Cain, 20–21, 24 Tolstoy, Leo, 48, 74, 153, 156, 198 top-down processing, 126 Torse des Pyrenees (Arp), 101 Training Up, 134 Transparent (television show), 184 Travers, Peter, 196, 237n69 Treatise of Human Nature, A (Hume), 62, 73, 79 Tree of Life, The (film), 177 trompe l’oeil, 235n49 truffle pigs, critics as, 104, 140 Trump, Donald, 190– 91 Turn of the Screw, The (James), 170, 171 Ukiyo-e, 50 Ulysses (Joyce), 200 United States, microcultures, plurality of, 40–41

255

Updike, John, 154 Utilitarianism (Mill), 103 Varèse, Edgard, 227n48 Vartanian, Oshin, 125–27, 129–30, 225n28, 227n43 Vendler, Helen, 4 Viola, Bill, 215n31 Vivaldi, Antonio, 230n20 Wachowski brothers, 177 Wallace, David Foster, 83 Walker, Alice, 232n17 Walker, Derek, 234n40 Walton, Kendall, 29, 51, 53, 89, 123, 173, 210n24, 216n50, 225n25, 230n25; category selection, 52; guernicas, 52; theory of art, 72 Warhol, Andy, Brillo Box, 50– 51 Warren, Karen, 16 Washington, George, 27 Weitz, Morris, 96– 97 White, Gilbert, 167 Whitney Museum, 181 Wieand, Jeffrey, 84 Wiggins, David, sensible subjectivism, 54 Williams, Bernard, 229n15 Williams, Christopher, 221n15 Wilson, Timothy, 124 wine: blind tasting, 21; and blocking, 17–18; chain of “respect,” 19; chemicals in, 23–25; cognitive and sensory pleasures, distinction between, 20; and comparison, 21; and culture, 21; and education, 21; expertise, importance of, 17, 20; and identification, 20; individual flavors, 22–23; and knowledge, 20–21; and objectivity, 18– 19; personality terms, 19; and recall, 20; and taxonomy, 20; Wine Aroma Wheel, 18; winespeak, disparaging of, 19 wine tasting, 20, 25; as junk science, 23 Winfrey, Oprah, 194 Wiseau, Tommy, 196 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 49; and games, 48 Wölfflin, Heinrich, 222n28

256 Wollheim, Richard, 136, 222n28 Wood, Ed, 52, 196 Wood, James, 37 Woods, John, 233n30 Woodward, Richard B., 212n49 Woolf, Virginia, 154, 200, 232n17 Wordsworth, William, 167 Wysocki, Charles, 25 Yanni, 153 Yeats, William Butler, 4, 97

i ndex “Yellow Wallpaper, The” (Gilmore), 170–71 Young, James, 184– 86, 191– 92, 236n59 Zagat, 8 Zajonc, R. B., 124 Zangwill, Nick, 29, 43–44; aesthetic/ non-aesthetic divide, 38–40; aesthetic qualities, 38; condition-governedness, 38; substantive v. verdictive properties, 34; theory of art, 39