Criticisms of formalist-aesthetic theories of art
Despite (or because of) their intuitive plausibility and appeal, aesthetic theor-
ies of art have been subjected to considerable criticism. To many of their
critics, such theories have seemed to domesticate art to an idle plaything of
empty pleasure and in doing so to scant its cognitive, political, and spiritual
significance. This line of criticism begins as early as Wordsworth’s complaint
in his 1800“Preface”to the second edition ofLyrical Balladsthat talk oftasteis
the language of men who speak of what they do not understand; who talk of
Poetry as of a matter of amusement and idle pleasure; who will converse
with us as gravely about atastefor Poetry, as they express it, as if it were a
thing as indifferent as a taste for rope-dancing, or Frontiniac or Sherry.^54It continues in Duchamp’s stance–definitive for a great deal of Dada and
avant-garde art–that he is “interested in ideas–not merely in visual
products.”^55 The production of visual or aural or semantic beauty came to
seem to many artists to be less interesting and important than the produc-
tion of striking meaning or provocation or ironic wit. The philosophical
claim that art is a thing of pleasure seemed to many practitioners itself to
be a way of all at once misunderstanding, devaluing, and repressing the real
cognitive, political, and spiritual insights (or wit) that art may have to offer.
As Arthur C. Danto trenchantly puts this thought,
Distinguishing the fine from the applied arts, and identifying the former asles
beaux arts, constitutes a form of repression masked as exaltation paralleled
only by the perception of women as the Fair Sex. To put works of art or to set
women at what came to be known as an“aesthetic distance”–as objects
whose essence and fulfillment consists in pleasing the senses–was a brilliant
political response to what were felt as dark dangers in both...[In the arts]
aesthetic distance then does what frames and pedestals do to icons and
effigies, isolating them conceptually from the practical world and humiliating
them as objects fit only to caress the disinterested and refined eye.^56(^54) William Wordsworth,“Preface toLyrical Ballads,”in Wordsworth,Selected Poems and Prefaces,
ed. Jack Stillinger (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1965), pp. 445–64 at p. 454.
(^55) Marcel Duchamp,“Interview with James Johnson Sweeney,”reprinted inTheories of
Modern Art, ed. Chipp, p. 394.
(^56) Arthur C. Danto,“The Space of Beauty: Review ofThe Power of the Center: A Study of Composition in
the Visual Artsby Rudolf Arnheim,”New Republic(November 15, 1982), pp. 32B–35B at p. 32B.
Beauty and form 67