we may take“legitimate satisfactions”^47 in the“superior organization–
perceptual, emotional, constructive”^48 that a painting can display. Michael
Fried has developed at length the language ofabsorptionto describe the
character of the satisfaction of our interest in visual pleasure (including
how the design or arrangement presents its subject) by major paintings in
the western tradition from Chardin through abstract expressionism.^49
Formal criticism focusing on patterns of development and significance
(motivic, harmonic, rhythmic, etc.) has been the norm in the criticism of
music. In literary criticism, not only Brooks and the New Critics, but also
any critics who explicate the significance of semantic patterns (thematic,
imagistic, emotive, point-of-view related, etc.) by focusing on their details,
work within Beardsley’s general idiom.
In sum, for Beardsley“the form of an aesthetic object is the total web of
relations among its parts,”^50 including both its proper parts and its emer-
gent regional properties. The web of relations may be instanced as both
textureor relations among small-scale elements andstructureor relations
among large-scale elements.^51 When aesthetic experience (perceptual atten-
tion to the total web of relations) isunified,intense, andcomplexthen there is
successful art.^52 The unity of an experience is a matter of its“hanging
together”; there is closure, or a beginning, middle, and end, or the experi-
ence is“unusually complete in itself.”When there is intensity there is“a
concentration of experience”and an emotion“characteristically bound to
its object”(the work and what it presents). When there is complexity the
elements of the work function as“heterogeneous but interrelated compon-
ents of a phenomenally objective field,” that is, as interrelated foci of
absorbed, perceptual (including semantic) attention to the work.^53 Success-
ful art invites and sustains unified, intense, and complex perceptual experi-
ence–absorption –and all genuinely artistic making properly aims at
doing so (even where the result may be a failure, a partial success, or a
mere exercise piece).(^47) Ibid., p. viii. (^48) Ibid., p. 135.
(^49) See Michael Fried,Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1980), and Michael Fried,Art and Objecthood:
Essays and Reviews(University of Chicago Press, 1998).
(^50) Beardsley,Aesthetics, p. 168. (^51) Ibid., p. 169. (^52) Ibid., p. 462.
(^53) Ibid., pp. 527–28.
66 An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art