After the Avant-Gardes
- Arthur Efland, Art and Cognition: Integrating the Visual Arts in the Curriculum,
New York: Teachers College Press, 2002—on which, see my review, “Why Teach Art?”
Aristos, December 2006 http://www.aristos.org/aris-06/elfland.htm, reprinted, with
source notes, as “Why Teach Art?—Reflections on Elfland’s Art and Cognition”in the
March–April 2007 issue of Arts Education Policy Review, 33–39.
- The mythology surrounding Duchamp’s infamous urinal and his other ready-
mades has been responsible for untold error in the field of art theory and criticism, and
has inspired the most absurd follies among would-be artists. For a detailed debunking of
that mythology, see What Art Is, 263–65. Suffice it to say here that contrary to claims
such as that in the Dictionary of Art(“[Duchamp’s] conception of the ready-made deci-
sively altered our understanding of what constitutes an object of art”), Duchamp himself
emphasized toward the end of his life—having observed the mythologizing then well
under way about his “readymades”—that he “didn’t want to make a work of art out of
[them].” He further explained: “The word ‘readymade’ did not appear until 1915, when
I went to the United States. It was an interesting word, but when I put a bicycle wheel
on a stool,... there was no idea of a ‘readymade,’ or anything else. It was just a dis-
traction. I didn’t have any special reason to do it, or any intention of showing it, or
describing anything. No, nothing like that.” Quoted in Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with
Marcel Duchamp, tr. Ron Padgett, New York: Viking Press, 1971, 47. For an especially
egregious instance of mythologizing, see my article “Museum Miseducation:
Perpetuating the Duchamp Myth,” Aristos, June 2008 http://www.aristos.org/aris-08/
miseducation.htm.
- The idea that works of art “aim at the production” of rich cognitive effects is, in
my view, misleading even with respect to work whose status as art is undisputed. Such
effects are indeed achieved, but as a by-product of other intentions. What artists aimto
do is give objective shape to their thoughts and feelings about life; if successful, their
work is rich in cognitive effects.
- As the Overview for the NEH summer institute (see note 3, above) noted:
“Because of the connection of the arts to perception (the sensuous element in
[Baumgarten’s] formulation), aesthetics made the arts its central domain. However, the
perception of artworks is not merely an affair of sensation. Memory, expectation, imagi-
nation, emotion and reason (including narrative reasoning) play an ineliminable role as
well. Consequently, since its advent, the field of aesthetics has been concerned with the
operation of fundamental psychological and cognitive processes.” The treatise in which the
term aesthetikwas coined was Alexander Baumgarten’s Meditationes philosophicae de
nonnullis ad poema pertinentibus(1734), tr. by Karl Aschenbrenner and William B.
Holther as Reflections on Poetry, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1954.
Baumgarten’s more extended work, not yet available in English, was his Aesthetica,
Hildesheim: George Olms, 1961 [1750]. On ancient Greek thought on the nature of art, see
Stephen Halliwell’s masterly study The Aesthetics of Mimesis: Ancient Texts and Modern
Problems, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002, to which I will refer often.
- As evidence of the widespread (but mistaken) view that Kant was a formalist,
see, for example, philosopher David Whewell’s claim that aestheticism—according to
which the value of a work depends solely on its “intrinsic” formal properties, not on any
reference to nature, morality, or other external considerations—“owed much of its inspi-
ration to Kant’s powerfully formalistic theory in the Critique of Judgement.”
“Aestheticism,” in David E. Cooper, ed., A Companion to Aesthetics, Oxford: Blackwell,
1995, 7. Ironically, that claim is controverted by Whewell’s own entry on Kant in the
Notes to Pages 38–40 201
