relations.”^28 Many artifacts–industrial or commercial or legal, for example–
can be understood as coming into existence for a variety of complex cultural,
personal, and political reasons. But they will typically not sustain continuing
imaginative exploration of their formal arrangements as distinctive ways of
presenting a subject matter as a focus for thought and emotion. If and when
they do, then we are tempted to think of the work in question as itself a new
form of art.
Close elucidation and what can be called critical understanding (as
opposed to broader, historical understanding) involves a particular kind of
attention to the art object. It involves dwelling on just why these elements
are put here, in these relations to one another, as a way of inviting and
sustaining imaginative exploration of the work. In describing critical atten-
tion to literature, Beardsley mentions the determination of“the contextual
meaning of a group of words”^29 and thematic interpretation of how a unified
but complex idea controls a work.^30 Brooks emphasizes the importance of
fields of connotation. In a successful poem“the terms are continually modi-
fying each other, and thus violating their dictionary meanings.”^31 The poet
“must work by [coherent] contradiction and qualification”^32 to present a
qualitatively distinct, singular experience. In general, characteristically
elucidatory-critical understanding of the arts is, in Dewey’s formulation,
both analytic or parts-discriminating and synthetic or overall-organization-
discerning. Elucidatory critical attention moves back and forth between
attention to discrete elements and the location of elements in an overall
arrangement. Here the act of critical understanding“is a function of the
creative response of the individual who judges. It is insight. There are no
rules that can be laid down for its performance.”^33
As Dewey’s talk of insight suggests, elucidatory-critical understanding is
perceptual, not inductive or deductive. As Arnold Isenberg has cogently
argued, similar elements can function very differently in different works.
Depending on the overall particular configuration of elements, a falling
wavelike contour in one painting may be graceful, in another jarring.
A modulation from G major to E minor may be thrilling or uninteresting,
depending on the overall context of the work. Accordingly, what the acute
(^28) Dewey,Art as Experience, p. 316. (^29) Beardsley,Aesthetics, p. 401.
(^30) Ibid., pp. 401–09. (^31) Brooks,“Language of Paradox,”p. 9.
(^32) Ibid. (^33) Dewey,Art as Experience, p. 313.
Understanding art 157