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미적 도구주의의 관점에서 본 예술비평의 인식적 성격
The Cognitive Nature of Art Criticism Viewed from Aesthetic Instrumentalism
오종환 ( Chong Hwan Oh )
인문논총 33권 93-116(24pages)
UCI I410-ECN-0102-2012-330-002388470

Why do we think that art in general and works of art are valuable? Because it provides or causes our experiences which are pleasing or delightful. If this is the case, then the value of works of art is instrumental. For they are means to a certain end, which is causing a certain kind of experience. Usually we call such experience aesthetic experience. Then, why is aesthetic experience valuable? There are two ways of explaining the value of aesthetic experience. The one is aesthetic autonomy which asserts that aesthetic experience has intrinsic value and the other is aesthetic instrumentalism which holds that aesthetic experience has instrumental, i.e. extrinsic value. These two positions are usually considered to be incompatible with each other. In this article I scrutinize the plausibility of that assumption and try to find a way of defending the position of aesthetic instrumentalism. The traditional theory of aesthetic attitude holds that the value of aesthetic experience is intrinsic because of the presupposition of disinterestedness. When we have no ulterior purpose(s) except the purpose of just having the experience of an object, it is said that the value of such a disinterested experience must be intrinsic, because it cannot be a means to other end. But could we say that the value of such an experience is really intrinsic, even when we cannot find any pleasure or delight in it? This is the doubt where aesthetic instrumentalism can get off the ground. If we do not say that something which is sometimes negative has value in its own, then we must explain its value in terms of its subsequent effects. The value of aesthetic experience, then, should be accounted for its unique consequences. Whatever they are, now the value of aesthetic experience is instrumental. I follow this way of reasoning according to Beardsley``s account of instrumentalism, but this account seems incompatible with his assertion of an aesthetic object as phenomenal object. Even though Beardsley does not accept the theory of aesthetic attitude, he holds that aesthetic experience is detached from the rest of experience and that aesthetic object is relationless to the actual object with which it is connected. But, in art criticism it is inevitable to call for many factors besides the aesthetic viewpoint, for example, cognitive and moral. In this article I argue that we cannot ignore the cognitive factor of a work of art to appreciate and evaluate it properly. The instrumentalist can hold that the aesthetic viewpoint is necessary to evaluate a work of art, because it is presupposed to understand its content at first in order to tell its subsequent effect(s). The assumption of this assertion is that there is no difference between interested and disinterested attitude, i.e. that the disinterested attitude for aesthetic appreciation is a myth. Following Dickie, we can argue that the alleged difference between disinterested and interested attitudes is in fact just that between attention and inattention. When there is only one kind of attention with different motives, there is no reason to exclude cognitive factor in the appreciation of a work of art. For the appreciation must have every feature that the rest of our experience contains to become an experience. And we know that the cognitive feature is most prominent in case of literature. Does the appreciation of art in general, however, have this feature? One possibility is Goodman``s theory that art is a system of symbols. But when we have non-objective paintings or instrumental musical works, Goodman``s explanation of exemplification seems implausible, because it does presuppose the context which can tell a work of art from its perceptually indiscernible counterpart. Danto``s explanation of the status of a work of art is much more plausible than Goodman``s in such cases. Danto holds that the distinction requires knowledge of the causal and the cultural context of a work of art, and that a work of art is emerged from its ordinary counterpart through interpretation. The knowledge of the art world which enables someone to grasp the significance of the way of representation is, then, necessarily contained in every criticism of a work of art. From this we can conclude that there must be cognitive nature of art criticism. We can also find this feature prominent in many contemporary theories, for example Margolis`` theory of art. Some people might criticise this position, because the cognitive feature is commented and noticed only in the classificatory sense, but not in the evaluative sense. But, for an instrumentalist there is no distinction between classification and evaluation of a work of art, because the distinction itself presupposes the aesthetic autonomy.

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