Imagine an artist creating new work, a painter applying paint to canvas with a brush, for example. Assuming she acts intentionally, is she responsible for the work she creates? Is she responsible, in particular, for whatever value her finished work has? In the first part of the paper, I formulate an argument for the claim she is not; I call this the Luck Argument. According to that argument, an important aspect of the work's value is due to luck, so not (...) something for which the artist is responsible. I then go on to challenge the Luck Argument. I suggest that intentional control is not the only type of control artists exercise over their bodily activity. There is another type, which I call receptive control. The concept of receptive control makes it possible to challenge a crucial premise in the Luck Argument. (shrink)

From Plato through Aquinas to Kant and beyond beauty has traditionally been considered the paradigmatic aesthetic quality. Thus, quite naturally following Socrates' strategy in The Meno, we are tempted to generalize from our analysis of the nature and value of beauty, a particular aesthetic value, to an account of aesthetic value generally. When we look at that which is beautiful, the object gives rise to a certain kind of pleasure within us. Thus aesthetic value is characterized in terms of that (...) which affords us pleasure. Of course, the relation cannot be merely instrumental. Many activities may lead to consequent pleasures that we would not consider to be aesthetic in any way. For example, playing tennis, going swimming or finishing a book. (shrink)

ABSTRACT A long debate in aesthetics concerns the reasoned nature of criticism. The main questions in the debate ask whether criticism is based on reasons, whether critics communicate reasons for their audience’s responses, and, if so, how to understand these critical reasons. I argue that a great obstacle to making any progress in this debate is the deeply engrained assumption, shared by all sides of the debate, that reasons can only be either theoretical reasons or practical reasons. My aims are (...) to put pressure on this assumption that, if there are critical reasons, they must be either theoretical or practical, and to suggest that, if there are critical reasons, the most central among them are neither theoretical nor practical. (shrink)

We argue that the aesthetic domain falls inside the scope of rationality, but does so in its own way. Aesthetic judgment is a stance neither on whether a proposition is to be believed nor on whether an action is to be done, but on whether an object is to be appreciated. Aesthetic judgment is simply appreciation. Correlatively, reasons supporting theoretical, practical and aesthetic judgments operate in fundamentally different ways. The irreducibility of the aesthetic domain is due to the fact that (...) aesthetic judgment is a sensory-affective disclosure of, and responsiveness to, merit: it is a feeling that presents an object, and is responsive to it, as worthy of being liked. Aesthetic judgment is thus shown to be, on the hand, first personal and non-transferable; and, on the other hand, a presentation of reality. We thereby capture what is right in both subjectivist and objectivist conceptions of aesthetic judgment. (shrink)

In the Western classical tradition music criticism represents one of the most complex and influential forms of performance assessment and evaluation. However, in the age of peer opinion sharing and quick communication channels it is not clear what place music critics’ judgments still hold in the classical music market. This article presents expert music critics’ view on their role, function, and influence. It is based on semi-structured interviews with 14 native English- and German-speaking critics who had an average of 32 (...) years professional activity in classical music review. We present the first visual model to summarize music critics’ descriptions of their role and responsibilities, writing processes, and their influences. The model distinguishes six roles : consumer adviser, teacher, judge, writer, stakeholder, and artist advocate. It identifies core principles governing critical writing for music as well as challenges that arise from balancing the above six responsibilities whilst remaining true to an implicit code of conduct. Finally, it highlights the factors that inform critics’ writing in terms of the topics they discuss and the discursive tools they employ. We show that music critics self-identify as highly skilled mediators between artists, producers and consumers, and justify their roles as judge and teacher based on a wealth of experience as against the influx of pervasive amateur reviews. Our research approach also offers occupation-based insights into professional music review standards, including the challenges of maintaining objectivity and resisting commercial pressures. This article offers a new viewpoint on music critics’ judgments and recommendations that helps to explain their expectations and reflections. (shrink)

Through an analysis of critical reviews and other commentaries on the annual Turner Prize shortlist exhibitions, I examine a philosophical problem which has put into question the rational basis for evaluation in art criticism: the lack of any agreed criteria for the evaluation of artworks. This problem has been most often addressed within philosophical aesthetics through two contrasting approaches: the attempt to formulate evaluative criteria, and the denial that such criteria are either possible or necessary. My response to this meta-critical (...) issue is an interdisciplinary study, in the form of an analysis of published commentaries on the Turner Prize, that examines theories of critical evaluation against an empirical investigation of actual critical practice. The Turner Prize has a number of advantages as a case study. Extensive media coverage of the competition means that it is possible to study a wide range of sources intended for the art-going public, that contain a large body of examples of comparative critical evaluation, and as an annual event it offers the opportunity for both synchronic and diachronic analyses. Moreover, the regular presence of artists whose work has been characterised as ‘conceptual, ensures that many of the commentaries focus on an area of art that presents a particular challenge to aesthetic theory and critical practice. In order to develop a critique of criteria based approaches, the contrasting approaches to art criticism taken by Noel Carroll and Frank Sibley are explored within an analysis of the critical reasons given to justify evaluations of Turner Prize exhibits. Suggestions are offered for ways of developing alternative approaches, drawing upon theories of the aesthetic developed by Suzanne Langer and Kendall Walton. (shrink)

Introduced into the philosophical lexicon during the Eighteenth Century, the term ‘aesthetic’ has come to be used to designate, among other things, a kind of object, a kind of judgment, a kind of attitude, a kind of experience, and a kind of value. For the most part, aesthetic theories have divided over questions particular to one or another of these designations: whether artworks are necessarily aesthetic objects; how to square the allegedly perceptual basis of aesthetic judgments with the fact that (...) we give reasons in support of them; how best to capture the elusive contrast between an aesthetic attitude and a practical one; whether to define aesthetic experience according to its phenomenological or representational content; how best to understand the relation between aesthetic value and aesthetic experience. But questions of more general nature have lately arisen, and these have tended to have a skeptical cast: whether any use of ‘aesthetic’ may be explicated without appeal to some other; whether agreement respecting any use is sufficient to ground meaningful theoretical agreement or disagreement; whether the term ultimately answers to any legitimate philosophical purpose that justifies its inclusion in the lexicon. The skepticism expressed by such general questions did not begin to take hold until the later part of the 20th century, and this fact prompts the question whether (a) the concept of the aesthetic is inherently problematic and it is only recently that we have managed to see that it is, or (b) the concept is fine and it is only recently that we have become muddled enough to imagine otherwise. Adjudicating between these possibilities requires a vantage from which to take in both early and late theorizing on aesthetic matters. (shrink)

I argue that principles need to be appealed to in criticism especially when critics deliberate and determine the consistency between their verdicts on individual artworks. Following Frank Sibley, we can take principles as identifying properties with inherently positive or negative polarities that can be reversed in interactions with other properties. I contend that we should understand the character of such principles as having ceteris paribus hedges that restrict the scopes of the principles to artworks in which the inherent polarities of (...) cited qualities are not undermined or reversed. This is to adopt Michael Strevens’ ‘narrowing’ approach to interpreting ceteris paribus clauses. A consequence of such hedges is that the conditions of application of critical principles—when certain polarities are not undermined or reversed—may be partly opaque and unknown. Unpacking the opaque truth conditions of such principles, then, helps to make sense of how critics go about working out the consistency between their verdicts. This view of critical principles is consistent with and even predicts Arnold Isenberg’s particularist intuition that verdicts can be directly perceived without the need to infer them from principles. After all, opaque truth conditions mean that sometimes critics may not know whether an inference from a principle to verdict is valid. Ultimately, this view of hedged principles helps to make sense of critical aesthetic practice and accords with both the generalist intuition that critical reasons, to be reasons, require principles and the particularist intuition that inferences to verdicts can be short-circuited by direct acts of perception. (shrink)

I argue that Kant’s aesthetic theory yields a fruitful theory of art criticism and that this theory presents an alternative both to the existing theories of his time and to contemporary theories. In this regard, my dissertation offers an examination of a neglected area in Kant scholarship since it is standardly assumed that a theory of criticism flies in the face of some of Kant’s most central aesthetic tenets, such as his rejection of aesthetic testimony and general objective principles of (...) taste. If art criticism is an enterprise of providing evaluations of artworks supported by reasons, then it is hard to see what the Kantian art critic can do for us. If I cannot defer to the critic’s judgment that she loved Blade Runner and there are no feasible general principles linking the depiction of futuristic cityscapes, or the accompaniment of a haunting minimalist soundtrack to the goodness of a film, then it does not seem to matter whether the critic communicates to me her evaluation of Blade Runner or supports her evaluation with descriptions of Blade Runner scenes. Nevertheless, the assumption that these Kantian tenets preclude the possibility of art criticism is mistaken and it is my aim to show how this can be. The project has two phases. In the first phase I develop a new interpretation of Kant’s theory of artistic beauty. In the second phase I make use of this interpretation to put forward a Kantian account of art criticism. Central to my interpretation is the notion that judgments of perfection, e.g., Blade Runner is an excellent neo-noir science fiction film, inform our aesthetic evaluations and receive support from descriptions of non-aesthetic properties of the film. It is precisely this underappreciated role of judgments of perception that I exploit in making room for Kantian art criticism. (shrink)