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Séances spéciales de séminaire

Dominic McIver Lopes (université de Vancouver, Canada) donnera quatre conférences sur la théorie philosophique de l'art dans le cadre du séminaire de Jean-Marie Schaeffer « La création artistique ».

A founding figure of contemporary analytic aesthetics opened his magnum opus by declaring that “there would be no problems of aesthetics… if no one ever talked about works of art.” This sentiment comes to life in the large and prominent literature disputing theories of art, which are driven by certain avant-garde puzzle cases. How is Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased De Kooning Drawing art if a blank sheet of paper is not? How is John Cage’s 4ʹ33ʺ art when four and a half minutes of silence are not? Without a theory of art to answer these questions, it seems we could hardly begin to understand what it is to appreciate works of art. Thus theories of art have come to serve as the entry point to theories of appreciation in most contemporary aesthetics. These four conferences explore the hypothesis that it is a mistake to link theories of appreciation to theories of art and they outline an alternative approach to appreciation.

A Buck-Passing Theory of Art
Jeudi 28 avril, de 13 h à 15 h, amphithéâtre François-Furet, 105 bd Raspail
Existing theories of art complete the schema “item x is a work of art if and only if…” in order to provide a principle that sorts the puzzle cases into art and non-art. However, they have reached an impasse because they reflect and are unable to negotiate conflicting intuitions about the puzzle cases. For this reason, it is worth considering a “buck-passing” theory of art: “item x is a work of art if and only if x is a work in activity P and P is one of the arts.” This theory is viable if (1) what is puzzling about the puzzle cases is how each belongs to an art form, (2) art is not a theoretical concept of empirical art research (e.g. in history and anthropology), and (3) appreciation does not detect a special artistic value. This conference addresses (1) and (2).

The Myth of Artistic Value
Jeudi 12 mai de 13 h à 15 h, salle 7, 105 bd Raspail
A distinction between artistic and aesthetic value seems mandated by the puzzle cases. If aesthetic value lies in perceptible features of works then Erased De Kooning Drawing has the same aesthetic value as any blank sheet of paper, but Erased De Kooning Drawing does not have the same value as a mere blank sheet of paper, so it has distinct value “as art.” This conclusion is inconsistent with the buck-passing theory of art. However, a case can be made that the value of a work “as art” is its value as an item in an art form, just as the buck-passing theory predicts. As a result, we may rely on a theory of aesthetic value that does the work that some now assign to a theory of artistic value.

Appreciative Kinds and Aesthetic Appreciation
Jeudi 26 mai, de 13h à 15 h, amphithéâtre François-Furet, 105 bd Raspail))
The buck passing theory is designed to redirect philosophical attention from theories of art to theories of the art forms. We need a theory of what it is for a kind to figure in appreciation. The classic view was proposed by Kendall Walton, who noted that any work belongs to indefinitely many perceptually-defined kinds and the aesthetic features it appears to have depend on how we categorize it into a perceptually-defined kind. This conference adapts Walton by defining appreciative kinds in terms of media, where media are means for making that are relevant to appreciation. This does not imply the questionable doctrine that each art has a unique and specific material medium.

Harnessing theories of aesthetic value to aesthetic theories of art stretches them to apply to all kinds of art. The puzzle cases took aesthetic theories of art to the breaking point. The buck-passing theory decouples theories of aesthetic value from aesthetic theories of art, allowing for the development of theories of aesthetic value as realized not in art generically but only in specific forms. This conference argues that all we need in order to understand appreciation is a theory stating what it is for a work to have aesthetic value as a member of some specific art form or genre. Resources are drawn from some of the new work being done in general value theory on genre-relative value (e.g. Joseph Raz and Judith Jarvis Thompson).