Kiyohiro Sen

It is widely acknowledged that aesthetic judgments of works of art are (often, if not always) category-dependent. In this paper, I argue that the categories in which a work is correctly perceived, judged and appreciated are not necessarily the categories to which it actually belongs. The principle that the adequate appreciation of a work must be made in a category to which it belongs should be rejected because it cannot accommodate the strangeness of some innovative works of art. An innovative work might be correctly judged in an old category to which it does not belong, which supports my conclusion that classification may not really matter in category-dependent aesthetic judgments.

What is unique about art genres? In this paper, I will show that genres are best understood as clusters of regulative rules for appreciation. Evaluation, interpretation, and other appreciative responses to a work of art are sensitive to how the work is categorised, and genres are the categories that play a normative role in this context. Genres as rules have social foundations and arise from a speech act that I distinguish from classification and call framing. Based on this account, I will illustrate genre practices as social practices in which we declare and propose rules of appreciation to each other.

According to one strongly supported view, fiction is a functional kind that communicates imaginings. Combining this definitional thesis with a plausible principle concerning functional kinds leads to the following evaluative thesis: features that contribute to communicating imaginings constitute good-making features as fiction, and features that impede this constitute bad-making features as fiction. However, this thesis is at odds with the actual practice of fiction. Critics can show their admiration for complicated works of fiction by stating, “That’s beyond my imagination!” I argue that in resolving this paradox of hard-to-imagine fiction, we should not deny the observation, but rethink the definitional thesis. Works of fiction that are puzzling, redundant, contradictory, and collapsed can have a unique value that smooth works cannot. They can have value as fiction in that they challenge our imagination or place us in an exotic state of being lost in the imagination.

This dissertation examines the practice of categorizing works of art and its relationship to art criticism. How a work of art is categorized influences how it is appreciated and criticized. Being frightening is a merit for horror, but a demerit for lullabies. The brushstrokes in Monet's "Impression, Sunrise" (1874) look crude when seen as a Neoclassical painting, but graceful when seen as an Impressionist painting. Many of the judgments we make about artworks are category-dependent in this way, but previous research has rarely examined in depth the ontological structure of art categories, how they are generated and maintained, and how they function. This dissertation fills this gap. The proposal of this dissertation can be summarized as follows. Categories (especially genres) should be analyzed as clusters of rules that regulate the responses and behaviors of agents in the artworld. The visual mundaneness is a critical reason to consider Duchamp's "Comb" (1916) provocative, given the existence of the readymade as a set of rules that justifies such reasoning. The critical and appreciative practice of which categorization is a part is a social practice of making, declaring, proposing, reforming, and developing rules of appreciation. How we appreciate artworks, and how criticism guides our appreciation, is sensitive to how we categorize artworks. How we categorize artworks is sensitive to what categories have been set up in our community and which categories are active regarding each artwork.

It is widely acknowledged that categories play significant roles in the appreciation of artworks. This paper argues that the correct categories of artworks are institutionally established through social processes. Section 1 examines the candidates for determining correct categories and proposes that this question should shift the focus from category membership to appreciative behaviour associated with categories. Section 2 draws on Francesco Guala’s theory of institutions to show that categories of artworks are established as rules-in-equilibrium. Section 3 reviews the explanatory benefits of this institutional theory of the correct category. [Winner of the 2022 Debates in Aesthetics Essay Prize]