Research
Knowledge, Perception, and the Prospects of Criticism
The underlying aim of the project seeks to develop and field arguments and evidence for aesthetic cognitivism about art. We aim to increase acceptance of the philosophical thesis and common sense view that our encounters with works of art, including paintings, literature and music, yields knowledge that is valuable to individuals and their cultures and societies. To this end, we intend to argue that:
This knowledge is sometimes of a kind that resists easy expression in propositional terms, and that its expression through or exemplification in works of art is in some cases necessary.
Our aesthetic experience of the works of art is responsible, in part, for both allowing access to and realizing this knowledge.
An important means of articulating this knowledge takes the form of art criticism (understood in the wide sense of critical discourse around art, thus including but not limited to newspaper criticism and academic scholarship)
Understood in this way, art criticism does not merely evaluate and describe works of art, but exists in an active and symbiotic relation such that the content of the critical text becomes part of what is realized in our aesthetic encounters with works of art, and vice versa.
Art criticism and the knowledge it yields is indispensable to our understanding of the aesthetic experience of art and indeed to art history.
The implications of our research would be to increase the philosophical robustness of the underpinnings of aesthetic cognitivism, and of the reasons to protect and promote the practice of art criticism, and of valuing art more generally.
Project presentation
A further implication would be to fine tune discussions of transcendence in relation to aesthetic experience, in shedding light on the way it is the transcendence implicit in the concept of aesthetic experience which is central to the way in which the moral and epistemic value of art is manifest.
While the primary methodology of our study will be philosophical argument and conceptual analysis, a significant focus both of the initial 16-month study, and to a larger extent the ensuing project in the event that funding for this is granted, will be on empirical methods. Here we intend to use natural language analysis technology (sometimes called “distant reading”) to examine large quantities of historical and contemporary source materials, in order to trace and trace the way in which art critical themes and concepts emerge in response to works of art and attach themselves to them, becoming part of the epistemic substance of the works of art they relate to. In the initial phase, we hope to develop a pilot project, looking at the way a particular body of criticism has interacted with a particular work of art, with a view to better understanding the conceptual transfer involved.
Project publications
"Aesthetic Understanding and Epistemic Agency in Art"
Dammann, Guy and Schellekens, Elisabeth.
Disputatio, vol.13, no.62, 2021, pp. 265-282.