![]() ![]() ![]() With Danto, it becomes apparent that beauty is inessential to art but, as Sedivy rightly suggests, contemporary theories' compelling reaffirmation of beauty's integral relation to (some) art tell against that view. This is one of several occasions on which I felt Sedivy's style or content would have benefited from some simplification. But I could not stop myself from hankering after the simpler explanation that I've been offering my students for years: thanks to Wittgenstein, Danto realised that meaning is use (context) and that Warhol's Brillo Boxes or Duchamp's Fountain could have no artistic meaning in the 19 th century because the 'atmosphere of artistic theory' needed to give them such meaning, or to allow Duchamp or Danto to initiate its conditions, was not there. I was grateful for Sedivy's fleshing out of Danto's use of 'forms of life' as objective historical structures interweaving into art-historical narratives to accommodate both essentialism and historicism. So that art has a timeless nature that we might understand and explain (embodied meaning), but that nature requires historical realization. ![]() An obvious example: Duchamp's Fountain could not have been presented at a mid-nineteenth-century salon because Fountain's particular way of embodying its meaning would not have been available. More precisely, as Sedivy explains, Danto appeals to the notion of forms of life to support the idea of 'objective historical structures' or 'closed ranges of possibilities' such that not all contents can be meaningfully entertained at all times. He does this by embracing the historicism in Wittgenstein's later work in a way that is coherent with his own core essentialism (i.e. In reaction to the neo-Wittgensteinian denial that art is definable, Danto looks for a way to combine essentialism with historicism. Both show that some form of historicism needs to enter into our understanding of art but where Belting analyses the inadequacy of art-historical concepts for identifying contemporary artworks, Danto argues that the correct narrative template became available with the art of the 1960s, forcing on us the question of the nature of art. It will be the task of Part 2 to argue that Wittgenstein's work helps dissolve the first dichotomy while conceptual realism about perception obviates the second.Ĭhapter 1 focuses on the question of the end of art as posed by the historian Hans Belting and the philosopher Arthur C. ![]() Her focus is prompted by the emphasis on visual art in twentieth-century discussions of beauty and the end of art, which made two oppositions more apparent: that between historicism and essentialism, and that between the aesthetic (or perceptible) and the cognitive (or conceptual). Sedivy's focus is on visual art she argues that beauty is perceptible, without implying it is only perceptible. The framework is Wittgensteinian the discussion of beauty is Kantian. Part 2 situates the issues thus identified in a new framework for art, perception and beauty. Themes of loss and reaffirmation engage the first part as it reconstructs leading arguments about the end of art and the devaluation of beauty in the twentieth century and the revival of beauty at the turn of the twenty-first. The book has two parts of three chapters each, an introduction and a conclusion. The book concludes with the proposal that beauty is the value of perceptual engagement, of the world's inseparable perceptible presence to us, and that this core value in human life may be reaffirmed for art. She looks for a way in which beauty might speak to a sense of ending in Western art without that implying that art is stopping, but rather that it is completely open. Sonia Sedivy's aim is to find a new intersection in the relationships between art, aesthetic properties, beauty, perception, Wittgensteinian realism and Kant's aesthetics. Certainly, too many for me to do justice to the multifarious strands they generate. As the title and subtitle suggest, there are many themes addressed in this book, perhaps too many. ![]()
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