Artistic predicates

✍ Scribed by Jeffrey Wieand

• Publisher: Springer
• Year: 1982
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 449 KB
• Volume: 16
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0022-5363
• DOI: 10.1007/bf00137169

✦ Synopsis

Philosophers have often characterized art in terms of special aesthetic qualities or concepts -things which mark off the world of art from the mundane, nonaesthetic world. Since qualities and concepts are represented in language, it is possible to replace talk about aesthetic qualities and concepts with talk about aesthetic predicates. Such predicates would apply (in some sense of "apply") only to works of art. If there really are such predicates, therefore, it should be possible to use them to deFme art, or at least to say something important about the difference between works of art and other things. This is exactly what Arthur Danto has tried to do with what he calls "artistic predicates" in his book The Transfiguration of the Commonplace. 1 I will argue in the present paper, however, that Danto's notion of "artistic predicates" is incoherent and that there is no special class of predicates which apply only to works of art and to nothing else.

In an early paper, "The Artworld, ''2 Danto defined a class of predicates which he called "artistically relevant predicates." Artistically relevant predicates were predicates of theories which, according to Danto, were held by the artworld and which served somehow to make or transform ordinary objects into works of art. In The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, however, Danto abandons artistically relevant predicates in favor of artistic predicates. Artistic predicates make up the "language of art," and are used to characterize and interpret works of art. But artistic predicates do not merely describe artworks; in an important sense they are supposed to evaluate them. Unlike technical expressions used by the artworld (e.g., "chiaroscuro," "triforium," and "cantabile") which are, according to Danto, "value-free," artistic predicates "express values." Danto's examples of such predicates include "powerful," "swift," "fluid," "have solidity," "sharp," "eloquent," and "delicate" (TC, p. 155).

When Danto says that artistic predicates "express values," he means not merely that they can be used to evaluate, but rather that they are "evaluative terms."