Abstract

The upshot of the project as a whole is that if art is expression but also open, then the real payoff for art theory insofar as it deals with art as expression is to be gained only from a detailed analysis of the possibly distinct ways in which it can be expressive, a task I have begun in regard to the expression of emotion in art. But given the openness of art, the prospect for an expression theory of art that satisfies the demand of traditional art theory and is descriptively adequate seems to me to be rather dim. ;But there is a price to pay by taking such a combined view. It is to admit that we can conceive of the traditional arts as forming a distinctive kind of human activity only in terms of the past. Whether or not one can thereby collect everything that we now call 'artworks'--and it seems unlikely that this will be possible without considerable strain--the alternative for the art theorist is to give up the traditional demand of art theory and read 'art' in only the broadest and very nearly emptiest of ways. I argue that the tension between these alternatives is not to be resolved by descriptive art theory and that our thinking about art reflects this divided mind. ;Nevertheless, there is still much to be learned about artworks by probing the idea that art is expression. I suggest that the truth of this claim is not challenged by a standard objection to the effect that works of art possess expressive qualities that are not tied to any state of the artist's mind. But can the art product, as opposed to the art process, be expressive at all? Developing some of the views of Guy Sircello, I claim that it is as reasonable to think of works of art as being able to express the feelings of the artist as it is to think of the human face as being able to express emotions. Still, what is needed is a general theory of expression of which cases of both sorts will be instances. My thesis here is that Sircello's basic theory of expression in terms of the expression showing and being caused by the state of mind expressed is adequate to the task for emotions given some reinterpretation of these central notions as formulated by Sircello. ;My purpose in this essay is to explore the nature of and prospects for an adequate expression theory of art in the face of what I argue to be the openness of art. If art is open in the sense that there is no non-trivial defining goal for artistic activity as such, then an expression theory of art that will meet the traditional requirement that a theory of art provide criteria for distinguishing the arts from other forms of purposive activity will have to combine with an institutional theory of art. For my purposes an institutional theory of art is a theory which attempts to define art in terms of some set of suitably distinctive traditions as opposed to one which seeks to define art by way of identifying some present goal which, characteristically, the arts pursue. Such a theory can be formulated, I argue, in a way that is non-circular, by defining the institutional traditions of the artworld as ones developing out of a common source in the history of art where the function of art was generally viewed primarily or significantly in aesthetic terms