Rob Van Gerwen

I.What are the genre characteristics of an autobiography? Is it journalism about anecdotes from the writer’s life? Or is it a personal fiction based on truthful memories that conveys the nature and logic of the writer’s youth? Biographies certainly differ from philosophical texts with their argumentative strategies. How was I to read Germs? If I just read on, like one reads a novel, I might overlook details relevant to the life recounted. Reading intently, in contrast—like you would a philosophy book—might make one miss the peculiar scope of events. Anecdotes may lack insight into the social context, the psychological background, and the future of those involved. A remark from Aristotle about the difference between art (poetry) and history motivates me in this review. Poetry, Aristotle thinks, is more philosophical than history because it delivers universal knowledge:By universal truths are to be understood the kinds of thing a certain type of person will probably or necessarily say or do in a given situation; and this is the aim of poetry, although it gives individual names to its characters. The particular facts of the historian are what, say, Alcibiades did, or what happened to him. (Aristotle, 1986, 1451b7, p. 43–44)

In this Editor’s column I discuss certain fruits and limits of applying the notion of ‘performance’ to works of art. Art works can be viewed as perfor- mances, the public furnishing of works’ final form. Concerts can be viewed as performances of a work scored by someone else, the composer, but not all arts are double in this sense. Moreover, art can be viewed as mirroring the psychological, phenomenological and rhetorical aspects of human interaction, which exemplify the way people scrutinise moral situations. Not all performances are artistic, let alone art.

Robert Bresson's cinematography allows him to show the affordances that things and situations have for characters in a film. By intimating these affordances, Bresson authentically presents the affordances as well as the characters. The fact that Bresson views and conceives of his `actors' as models, rather than as malleable actors, illustrates, again, an effort to authentically film real persons in real situations. Recognising people authentically is done in real-life through a reciprocal gaze, which is not automatically available to the camera's lens, an apparatus that does not look back at one. Perhaps, Nuri Bilge Ceylan's approach fits this effort better: not a writing with sounds and images, but an intuitive use of homeliness.

Certain art theorists think of what artists do as artistic research. But research is fact- and theory-driven, whereas when a film is being made what directors do is scrutinise what they see happening before their eyes. This scrutiny is guided by aesthetic judgement, individual style, and subjective intuition. It makes good sense to investigate the research that went on before a work was made, and to look at the theoretical implications of that work. But the most important work to be done is our paying attention to the scrutiny that went on during the work's actual creation. The importance and meaning of art are in the artist's scrutiny.

In this article I propose to understand inertia in art as a “disposition to meaning”. I compare inertia in art with that of a face of a person recently deceased. To acquaintances, i.e. to family and friends, it holds a promise of memories (of the deceased); to all the others the corpse offers the possibility of a projection of meanings. Art is made of plain, or extra-ordinary stuff, which is turned into artistic material. The artist is to bring the inert potency of stuff to artistic life, and to turn it into something that is expressive. If she is successful, then the work will offer its audience a concentrated, absorbing experience. Art is autonomous in that the aimed for experience is morally neutral. In the view of many contemporary artists, such experiences fail art’s deeper significance: absorbing experiences are, simply, too easy. If artists want to really move the audience (to emotion), or so they feel, they should also move the audience into action. Wanting to achieve this is not just difficult; it is a paradox

A philosophical analysis of the future of art must explicate art’s nature, as well as discuss the historical nature of art practice. Only so can one explain those contemporary developments in art which have led many people to doubt whether art even has a future. Arguably, art practice as we know it started with the installing of the modern system of the fine arts. I explain the pragmatics of art so understood, and suggest that we can define art, internally. We need not resort to a nominalist approach that claims that something is a work of art if some representative of the art world says it is. Instead of such empty proceduralism, I explain how all art’s focal objects, persons and activities are mutually adjusted and can only be understood in light of the whole. Within that whole of art practice, the contemporary samples of art’s alleged failure can be assessed. Now the modern system treats the arts as aesthetic, and prescribes that to judge a work one has to experience it for oneself. Why this should be so, I explain in terms of the perceivability of the artist in the work. Next, art develops as a whole rather than in a piecemeal manner. Particular contemporary works may alienate the audience from art practice, yet once they are recognisably in a procedure which has clear artistic potency they can be incorporated fruitfully in the modern system as explained. In all, the future of art is the future of the modern system, unless the system as a whole goes. We see this happen with the Taliban, but do not ourselves seem to be vulnerable to such onslaught. Yet, our culture may be in the process of eliminating the human mind from the objective reality, and if nothing stops us, art too will come to an end. Luckily, by then we will not be such as to lament that demise.

Iconic photographs are visual arguments depicting an, often dramatic, particular situation showing victims of disasters. Spectators watching the photo of the particular situation, empathise with it, and project the feelings evoked onto the events that form the context for the scene in the picture. This mobilises them into political action. In the process, however, the depicted personal misery is perused to exemplify the larger events. The tragedy of iconic photographs is analysed not as the misery experienced by the depicted persons, but as the breach of their right to shame which is required for the photo to acquire iconicity. Examples are addressed, as well as the contrast classes of the self-portrait and Byzantine icons.

This paper discusses the viability of claims of mathematical beauty, asking whether mathematical beauty, if indeed there is such a thing, should be conceived of as a sub-variety of the more commonplace kinds of beauty: natural, artistic and human beauty; or, rather, as a substantive variety in its own right. If the latter, then, per the argument, it does not show itself in perceptual awareness – because perceptual presence is what characterises the commonplace kinds of beauty, and mathematical beauty is not among these. I conclude that the reference to mathematical beauty merely expresses the awe in the mathematician about the intricate complexities and simplicity of certain proofs, theorems or mathematical “objects.”

Much contemporary art seems morally out of control. Yet, philosophers seem to have trouble finding the right way to morally evaluate works of art. The debate between autonomists and moralists, I argue, has turned into a stalemate due to two mistaken assumptions. Against these assumptions, I argue that the moral nature of a work's contents does not transfer to the work and that, if we are to morally evaluate works we should try to conceive of them as moral agents. Ethical autonomism holds that art's autonomy consists in its demand that art appreciators take up an artistic attitude. A work's agency then is in how it merits their audiences' attitudinal switch. Ethical autonomism allows for the moral assessment of art works without giving up their autonomy, by viewing artistic merit as a moral category and art-relevant moral evaluation as having the form of art criticism

Roger Scruton’s ontology of sound is found wanting on two counts. Scruton removes from music the importance of the performer’s manipulating of his instrument. This misconceives the phenomenology of hearing and, as a consequence, impoverishes our understanding of music. I argue that the musician’s manipulations can be heard in the music; and, in a discussion of notions developed by Richard Wollheim and Jerrold Levinson, that these manipulations have psychological reality, and that it is this psychological reality which brings to life the sui generis musical persona of musical expressiveness.

Richard Wollheim is one of the dominant figures in the philosophy of art, whose work has shown not only how paintings create their effects but why they remain important to us. His influential writings have focused on two core, interrelated questions: how do paintings depict? And how do they express feelings? In this collection of essays a distinguished group of thinkers in the fields of art history and philosophical aesthetics offers a critical assessment of Wollheim's theory of art. Among the themes under discussion are Wollheim's explanation of pictorial representation in terms of seeing-in, his views of artistic expression as a type of complex projection, and his notion of the internal spectator. In the final essay Wollheim himself responds to the contributors. This book will be eagerly sought out by all serious students of the theory of art, whether in departments of philosophy or art history.

My pleasure in being here, at the Studiecentrum Soeterbeeck, to discuss the book Roger Scruton wrote on beauty, is twofold. It so happens that I am finishing a book on facial expression and facial beauty, and the chapter I sent to Roger to request his comments, resurfaced unopened in my own mail box, last week. Apparently something went wrong in the mail. Today I might get some of those comments. Secondly, reading Roger’s book, an impression of a kindred spirit has stuck with me throughout.1) Sometimes, though, something like an ungrounded preference surfaces, which for Roger, clearly has intuitive force, maybe even the force of a conclusion, but for me this doesn’t always ring true. I only mention two instances where my own preferences would be different. One is, where after rightly criticising the reverence allotted to Duchamp’s Fountain, in a single sentence (on p. 98) both Radiohead and Brahms are mentioned, in an obvious effort to disqualify the former. The other is where he defends film as an art by comparing it to traditional art, by pointing to shots from an Ingmar Bergman movie, which “would sit on your wall like an engraving, resonant, engaging and composed.” (p. 102). What the incidental surfacing of such preferences makes available to us is that doing aesthetics is not a merely technical philosophical endeavour, but involves art criticism, from time to time. If you don’t love art or its core values, how could you do aesthetics? And there is a deeper thought behind this in Roger’s writings: that the use of taste belongs to the good life.2) All this, also, indicates my predicament, here and now. I feel most inclined..

Cellular, or mobile phones are great: they allow people to communicate over long distances whenever and wherever they are, and instantaneously at that when the one called is wearing one too. Having said that, though, it must immediately be added that they, also, have a complex disadvantage, and it is one we are hard pushed to understand. In fact, due to its complexity people simply tend to neglect it, even though everyone in his right mind has had experience with it. Now Walter Benjamin defined aura as “a distance however close it may be”.1) This has standardly been interpreted as a characterisation of an experience of presence, also by Benjamin. This aura supposedly suffered from the rise of photography. Aura can, also, be understood as inertia, the absence of something present. And whether aura is gone or widespread I gladly leave to more speculative-minded thinkers. I submit that we experience a person’s “aura”—her distance however close she may be—when perception tells us the person is present yet our mind realises that she isn’t. I am referring here to the observation had of another person engaged in a cell phone conversation. The inertia of the cell phone caller consists in her incapacity to address those who observe her. I think there is an immoral streak to her selfappointed moral autonomy. In a previous edition of this Dutch-Russian exchange on inertia I argued that our trafficking with facial expressions forms the model with which we’d best understand the workings of art—facial expression is the anthropological foundation of art. My discussion, today, of the cell phone conversation is meant to add to that previous suggestion