10 performance and the classical paradigm
artistic performances can take place. I shall explore below the suggestion
that the presentational systems characteristic of artistic performance are
designed to foster a particular kind of appreciation. But this appreciation
cannot be “aesthetic” in the traditional sense that associates the latter with
the experience of something as beautiful.
A further difficulty arises even if we can identify in a principled and
projectable way the presentational systems that enable artistic performances.
How are we to delimit the relevant conventions in such systems so as to
include performances of avant-garde theater and exclude stage hands who
ham it up while rearranging props between scenes? It might be said that this
distinction is embodied in one of the relevant conventions constitutive of the
theaterworld system. One of the things that qualified theatergoers know, it
might be claimed, is that the movement of props on stage by people who have
not figured in the dramatic action is not part of the artistic performance. But of
course this is not universally true. Certain modern plays – for example, Robert
Wilson’s 1981 production of Medea – deliberately integrate such activities
into the piece. This is why there is a problem in accounting for avant-garde
theater, where “stagehands” may not in fact be stagehands but, rather, partici-
pants in the artistic performance itself. It is not, it seems, the conventions in
themselves that exclude certain things going on onstage from the artistic per-
formance, but the spectators’ independent ability to work out which things
are part of the play and call, therefore, for a particular kind of attention.
4 Aesthetic Theories of Artistic Performance
This point is, I think, of great significance, and we shall return to it after consid-
ering the other approach canvassed earlier. This approach, it will be recalled,
aims to give an independent account of artistic performances in terms of
manifest features distinctive of such performances. It can then define the
performing arts as those presentational systems designed to present artistic
performances so conceived. This clearly avoids the kinds of difficulties seen
to beset the institutional approach. For, if we have an independent account
of the nature of artistic performance, we also have a principled way of deter-
mining which presentational systems are rightly included in the performing
arts. But, as we shall see, this approach faces difficulties of its own.
I shall take as a model here Monroe Beardsley’s (1982) attempts to clarify
the distinctive nature of those performances that we encounter in artistic pres-
entations of dance. Like Dickie, Beardsley brings a more general theory about
artworks to bear in his analysis. An artwork, for Beardsley, is an ordering of
elements with the intention that they afford a markedly aesthetic experience,
or an ordering of a type that is generally produced with such an intention.