writers, from Hegel to Virginia Woolf. There is every reason to think that in
tracing these tropes Abrams is doing something spectacularly accurate, apt,
and useful, even if he does not always linger either over passages of less
controlled, more ambivalent figuration or over less articulated matters of the
politics of culture.
Given the complex nature of the artistic object, all six broad strategies
for understanding art can yield useful, accurate, and consistent results.
Authoritative texts need to be established so far as possible, and single-
object, nonmultiple copy works such as paintings and carved sculptures
need physical care. Historical understanding of all kinds–Spirit of the
Age, biographical, and political-structural–can discern some among the
many reasons for which a work may have been produced. Tracing critic-
ally the achievement of formal arrangements that present a subject matter
as a focus for thought and emotion, fused to the exploration of the
material, illuminates success within the enterprise of art. Even“free”
appropriative refiguring, reuse, rewriting, or other response to a work by
subsequent creative artists can count as a form of understanding the work,
insofar as it exercises the same sort of creative powers manifested in the
work in relation to some of the same themes, motives, characters, or
formal elements, though it may drift quite far from explication or para-
phrase. In each case whether the critical understanding that is offered is
apt will depend on care, comprehensiveness, subtlety, and insight in
discerning and deploying relevant evidence; whether the critical under-
standing is useful may depend on the prior reception history of the work.
A history of close formal explication of a given work or set of works may,
for example, need to be balanced by more explicitly historical forms of
criticism, if the work’s full range of themes is to be recovered, while
historical criticism may need to be balanced with more formal explication,
if the singularly successful density and complexity of arrangement of a
particular work are to be kept in view.
In recent decades controversies about how to understand art, inspired
significantly by the general conceptions of how to understand literary texts
put forward by formalists, humanists, structuralists, poststructuralists, femi-
nists, and neo-Marxists, have spread throughout the disciplines of teaching
and writing about the other media of art. Joseph Kerman called in 1985 for a
new, more historical, less exclusively formal criticism of music, on the model
of the newer political-structural forms of historical understanding developed
Understanding art 155