standardly to attend tohowrepresentational and expressive features are
embodied in the formal arrangement. Is the arrangement–including the
arrangement of representational and expressive features (motives, images,
descriptions of actions and perceptions, etc.)–unified, intense, and complex?
Does it display purposiveness without a purpose in satisfying the attentive
mind that contemplates not the meaning for its own sake, but the meaning
as it is singularly embodied in the arrangement? If so, then the work suc-
ceeds in the aims of art.
It is true that there can be successful work that is immediately horrifying
or disgusting. But it does not follow that it is notalsopleasing and absorbing.
Our horror or disgust may be directed to the subject matter, but we may also
be pleased by and absorbed in how that subject matter is wholly rendered by
the form in a way that appropriately, and thus pleasingly, engages those
emotions. Here, as in Kant, we may enjoy among other things the sense that
our cognitive and emotional powers of attention are appropriately brought
into play, so that we are animated as human subjects capable of apt atten-
tion.^65 Quite arguably such a mix of horror or disgustandabsorption is just
what is going on in our relations to cases such as Picasso’sGuernicaor Philip
Roth’s description inLetting Goof a child dying from a fractured skull.
Horrified, disgusted, repelled, sickened, or enraged as we are by what is
presented, we nonetheless go on looking or reading, as the work embodies
in its arrangement a kind ofsaturatedauthorial point of view on its subject:
nothing is shirked; attention is wholly fixed on the subject matter andits
significance within human life; all the elements of the formal arrangement
serve to fix authorial attention; in dwelling on the arrangement we, the
audience, participate in that authorial attention, finding horror in the sub-
ject matter but also aesthetic satisfaction in both the fullness of attention and
the fullness of its embodiment in the arrangement.
The further one moves in attending to a given work away from dwelling
on the arrangement (in relation to what is represented or expressed) and to
dwellingonlyon what is represented or expressed, the more the work will
seem to drift away from successful art and toward propaganda or therapeutic
(but ill-formed) venting or treatise or advertising. When our attention is, in
(^65) Susan Feagin develops an argument of this kind in characterizing the pleasures of
tragedy:“The Pleasures of Tragedy,”American Philosophical Quarterly20, 1 ( January1983),
pp. 95–104.
Beauty and form 71