Gary Iseminger

(1937 - 2022)

Jerrold Levinson’s Music in the Moment is a welcome addition to the impressive list of books in aesthetics, particularly the philosophy of music, published in the last several years by Cornell University Press. In it Levinson expounds and defends a view, inspired by the work of the nineteenth-century English psychologist and musician Edmund Gurney, that he calls “concatenationism.” This view is billed as “a defense of the intuitive listener” against Schenkerian and other “architectonicist” theorists promoting the notion that “elaborate apprehensions of the form and technique of music are necessary to understanding it”.

Like most aestheticians today I begin by firmly separating the concept of art from the concept of the aesthetic; unlike them, I conclude by reuniting these concepts in the thesis that the function of art is to promote the aesthetic. I understand the existence of artworks and of artists to be “institutional facts” (though the institution of art is an informal one, not to be confused with formal institutions to which it has given rise, such as museums, academies, etc.), while I take “aesthetic situations,” involving appreciators and objects made, at least in part, to be appreciated, to constitute something approaching a natural kind. Rather than dealing directly with the concept of a function I argue for three theses closely related to the idea that the function of art is aesthetic: that art is better than any other institution at promoting the aesthetic; that art is better at promoting the aesthetic than it is at doing anything else; and that art was intended by its instituters to promote the aesthetic.

In The Aesthetic Function of Art, I was mainly concerned to show how my “new aestheticism” can meet standard objections to aestheticism, but I have come to realize that, since it is as much a new institutionalism as it is a new aestheticism, its institutionalist aspect requires defense as much as its aestheticist aspect does. In this article, I show how a judicious aestheticizing of George Dickie's second version of the institutional theory of art, incorporating fundamental features of my own view, can meet what seems to me to be the most serious objection to institutionalism in general, the dilemma famously proposed by Richard Wollheim