sagas that recount the myth-shrouded history of a people. Perhaps priests
carrying out rituals in intimate relation with a public once enjoyed signifi-
cant recognition and satisfaction. With the advent of modernity, however–
and perhaps well before that, as soon as there is a significant differentiation
of social roles–recognition and satisfaction achieved in intimate relation to a
fully coherent and receptive public are not so readily found. Dewey notes that
with the development of“modern industry and commerce”and the intensi-
fication of the division of labor,“artists find it incumbent upon them to
betake themselves to their work as an isolated means of‘self-expression’...
[T]hey often feel obliged to exaggerate their separateness to the point of
eccentricity.”^5
Works of art in modernity are no longer bound up immediately with
rituals, uses, the cultivation of social solidarity, and daily life. They instead
begin to function, with increasing division of labor and social stratification,
as vehicles of the display of individual temperament, talent, and interest,
against the grain of standardized manufactured objects. Works of art become
loci of the impress of distinctive personality, interest, and emotion in sensu-
ous material. Passionate, distinctive interest in an individual work may
increase for the artist and a circle of those with similar personalities and
interests, but at the cost of the widespread communicative function of art
in relation to ritual and the cultivation of social solidarity. Works of art
become things to be made in order to display one’s personality, tempera-
ment, and powers, in differentiation from others, and they come to be
collected as means of self-display, rather than used. In a famous article,
Stanley Cavell describes what he calls“aesthetic problems of modern phil-
osophy,”suggesting not only that there are certain problems about the
function and meaning of works that arise distinctively together with mod-
ernity, but that these problems have to do with the repression or loss of
sensuous aesthetic production as a widely shared practice of social meaning-
making.^6 Makers of art are aware of their freedom in modern artistic making(^5) Dewey,Art as Experience,p.9.
(^6) Cavell,“Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy,”pp. 73–96. For a full elaboration of
how the specific problems Cavell discusses are, according to him, problems of modernity
and its philosophy that involve the repression of artistic-aesthetic work as a practice of
meaning-making, see J. M. Bernstein,“Aesthetics, Modernism, Literature: Cavell’s Trans-
formations of Philosophy,”inStanley Cavell, ed. Richard Eldridge (Cambridge University
Press, 2003).
256 An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art