Category: 2023

22nd Feb 2023
Sonia Sedivy, University of Toronto

Aesthetic properties are pervasive in our lives and come up often in our conversations, yet theoretical disagreement prevails over their nature, their variety, their epistemic and metaphysical standing. This paper argues that aesthetic properties are highly heterogenous and that at least some are historical. I examine some consequences. 
Recent developments in aesthetics of the environment and of the everyday – along with the recent emphasis on taking a global perspective – suggest that aesthetic properties are much more heterogenous than we had previously recognized.  Aesthetic properties belong to artworks in any medium, to natural objects or scenes, and to artefacts across historical eras; and they draw a wide variety of responses such as our perceptions and emotions. 

Historicism about artworks carries over to aesthetic properties: aesthetic properties depend on facts of their broader historical context just as works do. I will argue that open-ended heterogeneity and historical specificity leave us without a way to draw a distinction between aesthetic and non-aesthetic properties. 
This distinction has been standardly assumed in aesthetics since Frank Sibley’s landmark work in the 1960s. If we lack principles that demarcate aesthetic from non-aesthetic properties, this affects how we can hope to explain aesthetic properties. I argue against supervenience theories that explain aesthetic properties in terms of their dependence on non-aesthetic properties. Rather, we need to explain aesthetic properties in ways that appeal to other aesthetic phenomena such as aesthetic value or aesthetic responses. The paper sketches several theories of aesthetic value to show how they can provide explanations of aesthetic properties.  

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22nd Feb 2023
David Collins, University of Oxford

Over the past decade it has become increasingly common—in popular discourse, in art education, among artists, and in the work of some art critics and academics—for works of art in various genres and media to be conceived of and evaluated largely on the basis of the political positions they explicitly and implicitly manifest (or are thought to manifest).

Appealing to R.G. Collingwood’s distinction between expressive art, or ‘art proper,’ and craft, especially the form of craft he calls ‘magic,’ I will argue for a reconsideration not only of the practice of thinking of and assessing art in terms of politics but of the very idea of ‘political art.’ In brief, the viewpoint that I will argue for takes an artwork’s success as an expression of an always-partly-affective perspective to itself have positive social or political value regardless of the politics of this perspective, and takes a ‘political’ artwork to be one that expresses a felt perspective on the political dimensions of a situation.

In contrast, the currently popular approach, I argue, reduces art either to ‘magic’ (i.e., propaganda) or to a mere vehicle for instruction (i.e., to the representation of a political viewpoint), and thereby fails to realize the distinct social or political value that Collingwoodian ‘art proper’ can have—ironically, given that those who now view and evaluate artworks through a political lens surely think that they are doing something politically positive.