exam #2 (chapters 27, 29, 30)

criticism (chapter 27)

legislative criticism: treats artistic AW as something up for refined discrimination and a self-conscious education in taste. Basically it tells you what, it speaks with conviction and assuredness.

There is a difference between critique and review. in the second you make descriptive comments about it and withhold evaluation. in the first you evaluate.

appreciative description: In appreciative description the critic functions as an intermediary between the work and the audience. The critic is presumed to have better taste, greater sensitivity to meaning, and more extensive relevant knowledge than the audience. The critic simultaneously evaluates and describes.

analytic criticism: you take the work and basically deconstruct it. you need to be informed of the latest theories. the advantage is analysis, the disadvantage is it tends to disconnect with readers.

interpretive criticism: The interpretive criticism that produces significance is usually directed to canonical works, and it serves a function similar to that of the re-staging of dramatic works.

cultural criticism: This notion of criticism comes from Karl Marx and Matthew Arnold. The idea is to put the AW's ideas into a cultural or socio-political context.

art & expression (chapter 30)

classical expression theory: Art is an expressive human activity (bu means of signs, feelings, experiences). For example, the artist expresses "sadness" to the audience by causing the work to possess or express sadness.

semantic theory: (defended by Nelson Goodman). It attempts to explain the central features of art within a theory of symbols. A expresses E, according to Goodman, if
1. A possesses E metaphorically, and
2. if A exemplifies E.

Example: If Guernica expresses horror, then the painting must express horror metaphorically by exemplifying it.

flavor vs. emotion: it's based on evoltution. there are 1. primary reinforcers: pheromones, (odors such as ripe fruit, and the smell of rotting food). 2. inter-species odors: odors of individuals may be pleasant because of major histo-compatibility complex genes, (e.g. same tribe, cultural region, etc). people smell like the foods they use. which specify olfactory receptors that signal reward produced be the smell of another individual with different immune system.
examples: a) homo S detecting individuals with a different immune system may have more diverse immune systems, and thereby greater resistance to disease. b) the odor of the cheese brie may be initially unpleasant, but may become pleasant after learned association with its taste and fatty texture (fatty texture is a primary reinforcer because of a high-energy value food).

art and morals (chapter 29)

aestheticism (autonomism): holds that ethical assessment is irrelevant to aesthetic assessment.  

An extreme version of autonomism is that it makes no sense morally to evaluate works of art, in the same way that it makes no sense for instance morally to evaluate numbers.

wholistic autonomism: moral aspects in the work -though relevant- don't need to conflict with its aesthetic role. I can say that "Hitler is wonderfully portrayed," or "the rape scene in Irréversible is very compelling," precisely because its depiction of human depravity. the autonomist is ready to admit (sith the moralist) that literary works of authors like Dostoevsky and Shakespeare, convey important moral insights.

immoralism: holds that works of art may be aesthetically good because of their ethical flaws. Although ethics and aesthetics are normative disciplines, they very different in scope. aesthetics evaluates beautiful non-beautiful, ethics evaluates right, wrong, Extreme immoralism: holds that the only aesthetic merits of a work of art are its ethical flaws. If so, Marquis de Sade one of the greatest writers of all time, and George Eliot one of the worst. Extreme immoralism is clearly weak.

moralism (or ethicism): in contrast holds that works of art are aesthetically bad because of their ethical flaws.

Jokes as a genre are at best analogous to works of art. Here the immoralist and the autonomist could agree but for different reasons: The autonomist would maintain that jokes are not in the moral sphere. It's an AS IF... without having to say that it's aesthetically good, precisely because it offends, which seems bizarre. on the other hand one has to agree that in the particular case of comedy (and humor in general) is an aesthetically relevant feature because it is offensive. the immoralist would say the more offensive, the better.

here comes the cognitive ethicist argument: works of art teach us moral truths and how we ought morally to feel. To make this cognitivist argument work it is not enough to show that art can educate us morally. One also has to show that its capacity to teach us is an aesthetic merit in it.