MA Aesthetics Seminar Spring 2005

Philosophy and Conceptual Art

Peter Goldie: peter.goldie@kcl.ac.uk
Elisabeth Schellekens: elisabeth.schellekens@kcl.ac.uk
King’s College London

WEEK 4: Conceptual art and interpretation

‘How can I appreciate it if I first have to read all that stuff about it!’

Reading:
Richard Wollheim, ‘Criticism as retrieval’, in his Art and its Objects, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1980.
Paisley Livingstone, ‘Interpretation in art’, in The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics, ed. Jerry Levinson,
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003, pp. 275-290.
Robert Stecker, ‘Critical Pluralism and Critical Monism: How to Have Both’, in his Artworks:
Definition, Meaning, Value, University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997,
pp.133-155.
Matthew Kieran, ‘In Defence of Critical Pluralism’, British Journal of Aesthetics 36, 1996, pp. 239-
51.
Also (reprinted in The Philosophy of Art, A. Neill and A. Ridley (eds.), McGraw-Hill, 1995):
Wimsatt, W. K., Jr. and Beardsley M. C. (1946), ‘The Intentional Fallacy’, Sewanee Review 54.
Barthes, R. (1977) ‘The Death of the Author’, in his Image-Music-Text, Hill and Wang.

How do we interpret works of conceptual art?

What is it generally to interpret works of art?
What exactly is it we are interpreting—the artwork’s properties (aesthetic and non-aesthetic), the
artist’s intentions, or both?

Two central questions:

1) What is the actual nature and extent of our interest when we are trying to understand an
artwork (descriptive question)?
2) What ought to be our interest, and is there anything that should in principle be excluded
(normative question)?
Two analogies:
1) Interpretation of actions.
2) Interpretation of utterances.

The intentional fallacy: Wimsatt and Beardsley:

‘… the design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the
success of a work of literary art …’ (p. 375 in The Philosophy of Art). ‘There is criticism of poetry and
there is author psychology…; but author psychology can be historical too, and then we have literary
biography, a legitimate and attractive study in itself … ’ (p. 379). The only relevant evidence is what
is internal to the work (p. 380).

Criticism as retrieval: Wollheim:

“Criticism”: ‘the process of coming to understand a particular work of art’ (p. 185). ‘The task of
criticism is the reconstruction of the creative process, where the creative process must in turn be
thought of as something not stopping short of, but terminating on, the work of art itself. The creative
process reconstructed, or retrieval complete, the work is then open to understanding’ (p. 185).

Critical Pluralism & Monism: Can there be more than one correct interpretation of a work?
Example: Santiago Sierra’s Space Closed by Corrugated Metal (Lisson Gallery September 2002).

Critical Pluralism: A multiplicity of divergent interpretations of artwork X can in some sense be

appropriate/correct. Or, ‘[v]iew that there are many acceptable interpretations of many artworks that
cannot be conjoined into a single correct interpretation.’ (Stecker, 1997, p. 134.)
Critical Monism: Denial of this claim – ‘the aim of interpretation is… restricted to discovering the
one true meaning of an artwork.’ (Kieran, 1996, p. 239). Kieran argues for pluralism.
Stecker’s Compatabilism: Critical Pluralism and critical monism are compatible.