LECTURE NO.

11

Does Beauty Lie in the Eyes of Beholder?

1
 Does Beauty Lie in the Eyes of Beholder?

 What is Beauty?
 What is Art?
 What is/should be the purpose of Art?

2
What is Beauty?
 The ideals of philosophy have often been summarized as “the
Good, the True, and the Beautiful.”
 Truth, Goodness and Beauty are normative concepts which, in
Ancient Greek philosophy, were thought to have a single origin.
 As such, beauty has been variously thought to be
1) a simple, indefinable property that cannot be defined in terms
of any other properties.
2) a property or set of properties of an object that makes the
object capable of producing a certain sort of pleasurable
experience in any suitable perceiver.
3) whatever produces a particular sort of pleasurable experience,
even though what produces the experience may vary from
individual to individual. It is in this last sense that beauty is
thought to be “in the eye of the beholder.”
3
What is Art?

 Etymology: From Latin ars, artis, skill, human

products that can arouse aesthetic experience.
 Starting from the eighteenth century, “art” replaced
“beauty” to become the central notion of
aesthetics.
 However, it has been difficult to provide a suitable
definition of art to enable one to distinguish
artworks from other objects and to bring all artistic
activities, such as painting, sculpture, architecture,
music, and literature, under one heading.

4
THEORIES OF ART

5
 1) Representational
or Mimetic Theory of Art
 Mimesis (from Greek mimesis, ‘imitation’), the modeling of one
thing on another, or the presenting of one thing by another;
imitation.
 The concept played a central role in the account formulated by
Plato and Aristotle of what we would now call the fine arts.
 The poet, the dramatist, the painter, the musician, the sculptor, all
compose a mimesis of reality.
 Though Plato, in his account of painting, definitely had in mind that
the painter imitates physical reality, the general concept of mimesis
used by Plato and Aristotle is usually better translated by
‘representation’ than by ‘imitation’.
 It belongs to the nature of the work of art to represent, to re-
present, reality.
6
2) The Family Resemblance Theory

 You may look a little like your father, and your father may
resemble his sister. However, it is possible that you look nothing
like your father’s sister. In other words there may be overlapping
resemblances between different members of a family without
there being any one observable feature which they all share.
 The resemblances between different sorts of art may be of this
type:
 Despite the obvious similarities between some works of art, there
may be no observable features which they all share, no common
denominators. If this is so, it is a mistake to look for any general
definition of art. The best that we can hope for is a definition of an
art form, such as the novel, the fiction film, or the symphony.

7
3) Expression Theory of Art

 A theory, developed by Croce, Cassirer, Santayana, Dewey,

Collingwood, and Ducasse, holding that all works of art are
expressions of the emotions and feelings of their artists.
 The properties of an artwork can be designated by the same words
that designate the feelings, emotions, attitudes, and moods of
human beings.
 Artistic creation originates with the highly specific but chaotically
indeterminate emotional states of an artist. Such a state drives an
artist to endeavor to articulate, clarify, and stabilize this emotion or
feeling.
 An artwork is the intuitionalizing of this feeling and the
embodiment of it in some definite and tangible concrete form.
Hence, artistic creation is a process of achieving self-expression.

8
 Beauty is successful expression. For instance, the meaning of
a musical work is its expression of a psychological state or
quality, such as fortitude, melancholy, or gaiety. The
appreciation of art requires us to retrieve the psychological
states undergone by the artist during creation.
 The expression theory rejects any instrumentalist view of art. It
argues that the production of art is not a matter of technique,
which is essential only for crafts rather than for art proper.
 The concrete form of an artwork is merely a vehicle for
communicating artistic feeling.
 This theory is influenced by Hegel’s idealism and a version of
it has been associated with Freudian psychological theory.

9
4) The Significant Form
Theory
 The significant form theory, popular in the early
part of the twentieth century and particularly
linked with the art critic Clive Bell (1881–1964)
and his book Art.
 It begins with the assumption that all genuine
works of art produce an aesthetic emotion in
the spectator, listener, or reader. This emotion
is different from the emotions of everyday life:
it is distinctive in having nothing to do with
practical concerns.
10
 What is it about works of art that causes people to respond to
them in this way? Why do works of art evoke this aesthetic
emotion?
 The answer Bell gave is that all genuine works of art share a quality
known as ‘significant form’, a term he coined.
 Significant form is a certain relation between parts – the distinctive
features of a work of art’s structure rather than of its subject
matter. Although this theory is usually only applied to the visual
arts it can equally well be taken as a definition of all of the arts.
 Significant form is an indefinable property that sensitive critics can
intuitively recognize in a work of art. Unfortunately, insensitive
critics are unable to appreciate significant form.
 Bell believed art to be an evaluative concept: this means that to
call something a work of art is not just to classify it, but also to say
that it has a certain worth.

11
5) The Idealist Theory

 The idealist theory of art, given its most persuasive

formulation by R. G. Collingwood (1889–1943) in his The
Principles of Art.
 It differs from other theories of art in that it holds that the
actual work of art is non-physical.
 It is an idea or emotion in the artist’s mind. This idea is given
physical imaginative expression, and is modified through the
artist’s involvement with a particular artistic medium, but the
artwork itself remains in the artist’s mind.
 In some versions of the idealist theory great stress is put on
the emotion expressed being a sincere one. This builds a
strong evaluative element into the theory.
12
 The idealist theory distinguishes art from craft.
 Works of art serve no particular purpose. They are created
through the artist’s involvement with a particular medium,
such as oil paint or words.
 In contrast, craft objects are created for a particular purpose,
and the craftsperson begins with a plan rather than
designing the object in the process of making it.
 So, for example, a painting by Picasso serves no particular
purpose, and was, presumably, not fully planned in advance,
whereas the table at which I am sitting serves a very obvious
function and was made according to a pre-existing design, a
blueprint.
13
 The idealist theory contrasts genuine works
of art with mere entertainment art (art made
with the purpose simply of entertaining
people, or of arousing particular emotions).
 Genuine art has no purpose: it is an end in
itself. Entertainment art is a craft, and
therefore inferior to art proper.

14
6) The Institutional Theory

 The so-called institutional theory of art is a recent

attempt by such writers as the contemporary
philosopher George Dickie (1936–) to explain how
such varied pieces as the play Macbeth, Beethoven’s
Fifth Symphony, a pile of bricks, a urinal labelled
‘Fountain’, T. S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land, Swift’s
Gulliver’s Travels, and William Klein’s photographs
can all be considered works of art.
 The theory states that there are two things that all
these have in common.

15
 First, they are all artefacts: that is, they have
all been worked on to some extent by human
beings. ‘Artefact’ is used in quite a loose way
– even a piece of driftwood picked up on the
seashore could be considered an artefact if
someone displayed it in an art gallery. Placing
it in a gallery in order to get people to look at
it in a certain way would count as working on
it.

16
 Second, and more importantly, they have all
been given the status of a work of art by some
member or members of the art world such as
a gallery owner, a publisher, a producer, a
conductor, or an artist. In every case someone
with the appropriate authority has done the
equivalent of christening them as works of art.
He or she has conferred upon the artefact the
status of ‘candidate for appreciation’.

17
7) Evolutionary Art Theory
 Some philosophers have started to take a longer historical
perspective when addressing questions about what art is.
 Denis Dutton (1944–2010), for instance, has written about
an ‘art instinct’, a universal phenomenon that explains why,
for example, there is a widespread appreciation of
landscape paintings that show rolling hills, water, and
trees: this is because the depicted environment is one that
would have been hospitable for early humans.
 The idea is that a preference for such scenes in real life
would have led to a greater chance of survival, and that
over the long period of human evolution in the Pleistocene,
humans evolved to prefer such scenes.
18
 Evolutionary theory can also give an explanation of why artists and
works of art are so highly prized despite being of no practical use.
 They are like the male peacock’s tail – flamboyant display gestures
that indicate that their possessors/creators have a surplus of
energy and prowess. The male peacock’s huge and beautiful tail is
a burden to it, making it easier for predators to catch, but at the
same time it signals to potential mates how healthy and fit it is.
 Similarly, creating works of art serves no immediate practical
purpose, but those who do create them signal their virtuosity and
skill. Like the peacocks with their elaborate tails, artists have an
advantage in terms of sexual selection, even though their activity
does not appear to have practical use.

19
What is/should be the purpose of Art?

1) Representation or imitation
2) Priority of particular over so-called general
3) Expression
4) Significant form
5) Genuine art has no purpose: it is an end in
itself.
6) Classification, not evaluation
7) Greater chance of survival

20
THE END

21