Ted Nannicelli

This article draws attention to some of the goods of our appreciative practices that we risk losing as AI becomes common place. I begin with a critique of what I regard as an unduly narrow conception of appreciation as, roughly, liking something, that is operative in much of the empirical aesthetics literature generally and the empirically oriented AI-aesthetics literature in particular. In contrast, I offer a sketch of appreciation that emphasizes perceptual-cognitive skills. Insofar as we deploy those perceptual-cognitive skills with the aim of tracking the exercise of human agency in the shaping of artworks, AI’s potential to decenter human agency from our art-making practices threatens them. The threat of appreciative deskilling arises because appreciation is attuned to the exercise of human agency; appreciating an artwork involves the apprehension of what a human agent does, broadly speaking, in a particular medium, and what they achieve, relative to their aims, in doing so. It is, therefore, far from clear how appreciation might proceed, let alone how such skills might be brought to bear as part of that activity, if there is no human agency for it to track.

This article draws attention to some of the goods of our appreciative practices that we risk losing as AI becomes common place. I begin with a critique of what I regard as an unduly narrow conception of appreciation as, roughly, liking something, that is operative in much of the empirical aesthetics literature generally and the empirically-oriented AI-aesthetics literature in particular. In contrast, I offer a sketch of appreciation that emphasizes perceptual-cognitive skills. Insofar as we deploy those perceptual-cognitive skills with the aim of tracking the exercise of human agency in the shaping of artworks, AI’s potential to decenter human agency from our art-making practices threatens them. The threat of appreciative deskilling arises because appreciation is attuned to the exercise of human agency; appreciating an artwork, understood as an intentionally designed artifact or action, involves the apprehension of what a human agent does, broadly speaking, in a particular medium, and what they achieve, relative to their aims, in doing so. It is, therefore, far from clear how appreciation might proceed, let alone how such skills might be brought to bear as part of that activity, if there is no human agency for it to track.

Recently, scholars in a variety of disciplines—including philosophy, film and media studies, and literary studies—have become interested in the aesthetics, definition, and ontology of the screenplay. To this end, this volume addresses the fundamental philosophical questions about the nature of the screenplay: What is a screenplay? Is the screenplay art—more specifically, literature? What kind of a thing is a screenplay? Nannicelli argues that the screenplay is a kind of artefact; as such, its boundaries are determined collectively by screenwriters, and its ontological nature is determined collectively by both writers and readers of screenplays. Any plausible philosophical account of the screenplay must be strictly constrained by our collective creative and appreciative practices, and must recognize that those practices indicate that at least some screenplays are artworks.

This chapter explores environmental art in relation to the aesthetics of the natural environment. The discussion is focused on three sorts of questions about this relationship – ontological, aesthetic, and ethical. First, the chapter surveys some of the ways theorists have characterized environmental art and proposes a semi-technical, stipulative conception of it. Second, the chapter considers the ontology of environmental art, drawing some rough-and-ready distinctions among the works that comprise this category. Third, the chapter discusses questions about the aesthetic appreciation of environmental art. The final part of the chapter explores the ethics of environmental art with a particular focus on its relationship to the natural environment.

This article introduces the term "mass AI-art" to describe the outputs of artificial intelligence image and music generators like DALL- E, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, AIVA, and Suno. Mass AI-art is characterized by having minimal human involvement and being produced in the absence of knowledge of how the AI works. The article starts with the observation that people evidently take an aesthetic interest in mass AI-art and en- gage with it partly to have aesthetic experiences. Further, it seems, prima facie, that mass AI-art is just another sort of human art in this regard. Yet, the article argues that such experiences necessarily differ in important ways from the aesthetic experiences afforded by traditional, human-created art. The aesthetic experiences afforded by mass AI-art are more akin to those afforded by inorganic nature insofar as in both cases all aesthet- ically relevant properties – that is, properties that bear upon one’s aesthetic experience – are formal properties. Thus, a consequence of the argument is mass AI-art is not bona fide “art.” The second part of the article offers a defense of this idea, arguing that mass AI-art is not created with the sort of intentional control that is plausibly a necessary condition for arthood.

Recently, scholars in a variety of disciplines—including philosophy, film and media studies, and literary studies—have become interested in the aesthetics, definition, and ontology of the screenplay. To this end, this volume addresses the fundamental philosophical questions about the nature of the screenplay: What is a screenplay? Is the screenplay art—more specifically, literature? What kind of a thing is a screenplay? Nannicelli argues that the screenplay is a kind of artefact; as such, its boundaries are determined collectively by screenwriters, and its ontological nature is determined collectively by both writers and readers of screenplays. Any plausible philosophical account of the screenplay must be strictly constrained by our collective creative and appreciative practices, and must recognize that those practices indicate that at least some screenplays are artworks.

Moral understanding is a distinctive cognitive good that has many facets. Noël Carroll’s idea of clarificationism helps show how screen stories can both clarify our moral knowledge and recalibrate our emotional responses. Moral understanding is an achievement that also consists in the capacity to know how to ask the right questions and, as Alison Hills argues, to know why in addition to knowing that something is true. Moral understanding has instrumental value in that it is often strongly connected to motivation for action. The influence of screen stories on moral understanding is likely to be “processional” or “cumulative,” developed over time and in relation to the development of one’s character.

Here is a puzzle about aesthetic education. In a variety of contexts, we commit significant time, energy, and resources to aesthetic education. We teach (and in many cases publicly subsidize) university courses and degrees that have aesthetic education as their primary aim; we also invest public resources into museums, including enrichment programs that are also designed to afford aesthetic education. It would seem that if our commitment to aesthetic education is rational, then aesthetic appreciation is something that can be done better or worse. However, we also, in a variety of contexts (oddly enough, some of them being the same sorts of contexts that are designed to abet aesthetic education), act as if it is true that there is no disputing taste. We may try to persuade students to come around to particular judgments, but we do not penalize students for judging one way or another. The aim of this paper is to dissolve the apparent puzzle of aesthetic education by clarifying its aims and advancing a conception of it that deemphasizes the role of taste. I claim that, pace “the default view of aesthetic education” (as I shall call it), the primary purpose of aesthetic education is not to educate taste. It is, rather, to facilitate the development of certain perceptual-cognitive capacities so as to enhance aesthetic experience and improve aesthetic appreciation. Thus, I call the view of aesthetic education advanced here “a perceptual-cognitive model”.

This chapter begins by outlining several kinds of relativism in the two fields that concern us here: philosophy of art and moral philosophy. It then turns to a brief review of the recent literature in experimental folk moral psychology which suggests the folk are meta-ethical pluralists—objectivists in some contexts and relativists in others. Taking the case of ancient Greek art that celebrates pederasty as a touchpoint, the author suggests that empirical work on the moral appraisal of art is likely to mesh with and lend additional support to this idea. The chapter concludes with a discussion of Bernard Williams’s “relativism of distance,” and the argument that there are, independent of the empirical findings, good meta-ethical reasons for considering a limited form of relativism about the moral standing of artworks.

To what extent, and on what grounds, can we ethically evaluate art from a generative context that is at some significant distance from our present reception context—at enough distance, at least, so that the two contexts differ, in important ways, in aspects of their moral outlooks? This paper has four aims. The modest task of the paper is to show that this question is much more difficult than has been recognised. The somewhat more ambitious goal is a methodological intervention: it is to highlight the need for interdisciplinary research that illuminates the socio-historical specificities of remote generative contexts in a way that allows us to see the relevant ways in which the moral outlooks overlap with ours (or do not). In relation, the third aim of the paper is to argue, with reference to Bernard Williams’s ‘relativism of distance’, that there are some cases in which the moral outlooks of a work’s generative and reception contexts differ so significantly that the warrant for our moral judgments of remote artworks is attenuated—if it exists at all. Finally, we try to demonstrate how the sort of interdisciplinary collaboration we’re advocating might inform our moral judgments of art—more specifically, in a way that invites a degree of quietude or uncertainty about remote artworks that are deeply morally troubling in our present reception context. We do this with reference to the paintings of Titian.

A COMPANION TO MOTION PICTURES AND PUBLIC VALUE A Companion to Motion Pictures and Public Value brings together original essays by world-renowned scholars investigating the varied intersections of the moving image and the public good. Covering a wide range of types and genres of cinema, this unprecedented volume explores the past, present, and possible future contributions of motion pictures to public value. With a cross-disciplinary approach, the text presents original conceptual work, global perspectives, philosophical arguments, historical discussion, empirical research, and specific case studies of the direct and indirect public value developed through motion pictures. Organized into seven thematic sections, this Companion identifies and discusses the various kinds of values that motion pictures can deliver, including artistic and aesthetic, ethical and moral, spiritual and religious, cultural, environmental, political, and cognitive. Throughout the text, readers are provided with deep insight into the issue of public value as it relates to cinema and its positive impact on human life and society. A Companion to Motion Pictures and Public Value is an ideal textbook for advanced undergraduate and graduate courses in Film, Media, and Cultural Studies, and is a valuable resource for scholars across a variety of disciplines.

James Harold’s Dangerous Art (2020) is a provocative and stimulating contribution to contemporary debates about the relationship between art and ethics—one that, I am sure, will redirect philosophical discussion in productive and important ways. In my view, the first half of Harold’s book will prove especially useful in advancing stalled debates by shifting our focus from the ethical features of artworks themselves to how those works affect us and the role they play in our communities (p. 96). Much of what Harold says strikes me as plausible and persuasive—particularly in the book’s first half, in which he focuses on the question of the ethically relevant effects of art. Therefore, in my role as critic, I will offer one suggestion for a way that Harold might refine his view on this topic—namely, by allowing that there are some cases in which what artists do in their artworks is both the proper object of ethical appraisal and closely connected to the effects their art has on us. I will then critically explore an aspect of the book that I found less convincing: Harold’s case for expressivism in Chapters 6 and 7.

This book investigates the interrelations between aesthetics, ethics and politics in a variety of visual media forms, ranging across art installations, film and television, interactive documentaries, painting, photography, social media and videogames. An international mix of emerging and established authors, with interdisciplinary expertise, explores how different ethical questions, political implications and aesthetic pleasures arise and shape one another in distinct visual media. Investigating themes such as the use of cinema as a medium for ethical and political thought, how documentary subjects both conceal and reveal truth, the new ethical challenges arising from interactive media and the role of images in responding to political events and trauma, this is a groundbreaking work about the interrelations of aesthetic, ethical and political values in visual media.

This book posits an interconnection between the ways in which contemporary television serials cue cognitive operations, solicit emotional responses, and elicit aesthetic appreciation. The chapters explore a number of questions including: How do the particularities of form and style in contemporary serial television engage us cognitively, emotionally, and aesthetically? How do they foster cognitive and emotional effects such as feeling suspense, anticipation, surprise, satisfaction, and disappointment? Why and how do we value some serials while disliking others? What is it about the particularities of serial television form and style, in conjunction with our common cognitive, emotional, and aesthetic capacities, that accounts for serial television's cognitive, socio-political, and aesthetic value, and its current ubiquity in popular culture? This book will appeal to postgraduates and scholars working in television studies as well as film studies, cognitive media theory, media psychology, and the philosophy of art.

"The question of what bearing scientific inquiry has upon the humanities is the subject of an important, ongoing debate in film and media studies. In the latest addition to the AFI Film Readers series, Cognitive Media Theory presents a case that the theorization of film and media spectatorship needs to take current empirical research in the sciences into consideration, and to show how empirical research informs film and media studies. Exploring topics that range from color perception and moral engagement to our cognitive response to humor, Cognitive Media Theory offers film and media scholars and advanced students an introduction to current cognitive theory through original essays that critically reflect upon the current state of the field. Contributors address key topics, genres, and media forms, and present the findings of specific experiments and case studies conducted across film, television, and video games"--

Artistic Creation and Ethical Criticism investigates an idea that underpins the ethical criticism of art but is rarely acknowledged and poorly understood - namely, that the ethical criticism of art involves judgments not only of the attitudes a work endorses or solicits, but of what artists do to create the work. The book pioneers an innovative production-oriented approach to the study of the ethical criticism of art, one that will provide a refined philosophical account of this important topic as well as conceptual tools that can guide future philosophizing and criticism.

This chapter offers a critical survey of philosophical debate about the nature and definition of screenplays, their relationship to finished motion pictures, and the screenwriter’s claim to authorship. Screenwriting may be studied as a kind of art practice in its own right and as an integral part of most sorts of filmmaking. This chapter focuses on the latter and outlines some of the ways in which screenwriting and screenplays connect to a number of philosophical questions about motion pictures—in particular, authorship, ontology, and evaluation in both artistic and ethical terms [1].[1] For a sustained discussion of screenwriting as an art practice in its own right and screenplays as literary artworks, see Ted Nannicelli, A Philosophy of the Screenplay.

This paper seeks to establish closer connections and spur dialogue between philosophers working on 4E cognition and aestheticians. In part, the aim is to offer a critical overview of the ways 4E research might inform our understandings of the arts. Yet it is also partly to flag some potential art-specific challenges to some of the theses found within the 4E literature. I start by examining the strongest extant claims regarding art and active externalism, and argue that it is hard to see either how active externalism could square with our actual appreciative practices or that its explanatory value could be sufficient to pressure us to revise radically those practices. Furthermore, I argue, rejecting active externalism seems necessary to acknowledge adequately the important ways in which artistic creation often involves the application of embodied know-how or the execution of embodied skills. For this reason, I argue, embodied approaches to cognition are better positioned to complement and inform the humanistic methods traditionally employed in philosophical aesthetics and art theory. However, I conclude on a moderately sceptical note: the challenge still outstanding for these approaches is to yield new understandings of our artistic practices that have not been gleaned through traditional humanistic inquiry.

This article advances and defends three claims: that the proper ethical criticism of environmental art requires a production-oriented approach-an approach that appraises the ethical merits or flaws of the work in terms of how the artwork is created as well as the consequences of its creation; that, depending on contextual factors, ethical flaws in environmental artworks may, but do not necessarily, constitute aesthetic flaws in those works; that, because environmental artworks appropriate part of the environment as an aspect of their identity, an aesthetic flaw in an environmental artwork necessarily also creates aesthetic disvalue in the environment-disvalue that exists in virtue of the creation of the artwork. I conclude with one further, more speculative claim, which deserves further investigation: the aesthetic flaws of an environmental artwork, which result in aesthetic flaws in the natural environment itself, are always ethical flaws of the artwork. This seems to make environmental art distinctive; in the case of non-environmental art, aesthetic flaws do not necessarily constitute ethical flaws.

This paper argues that debates over art exhibitions that make use of live animals, such as the Guggenheim Museum's 2017 Art and China After 1989: Theater of the World, are reflective of a schism between two general approaches to the ethico-political criticism of art. One of these approaches, the interpretation-oriented approach, is dominant in the art world and its adjacent institutions. The other, the production-oriented approach, is tacitly adopted by art-interested non-specialists. This rift explains why the use of animals in contemporary art—a practice that many art-interested people outside of the art world find bizarre and prima facie unethical—is so rarely discussed critically within art world institutions such as museums and journals. In an attempt to redress this oversight, the paper argues that the production-oriented approach is not only conceptually sound, but rationally preferable to the interpretation-oriented approach in many such cases.

Contemporary television has been marked by such exceptional programming that it is now common to hear claims that TV has finally become an art. In Appreciating the Art of Television, Nannicelli contends that televisual art is not a recent development, but has in fact existed for a long time. Yet despite the flourishing of two relevant academic subfields—the philosophy of film and television aesthetics—there is little scholarship on television, in general, as an art form. This book aims to provide scholars active in television aesthetics with a critical overview of the relevant philosophical literature, while also giving philosophers of film a particular account of the art of television that will hopefully spur further interest and debate. It offers the first sustained theoretical examination of what is involved in appreciating television as an art and how this bears on the practical business of television scholars, critics, students, and fans—namely the comprehension, interpretation, and evaluation of specific televisual artworks.

This article brings together two prominent topics in the literature over the past few decades—the ethical criticism of art and art interpretation. The article argues that debates about the ethical criticism of art have not acknowledged the fact that they are tacitly underpinned by a number of assumptions about art interpretation. I argue that the picture of interpretation that emerges from the analysis of these assumptions is best captured by moderate actual intentionalism. Reflection upon the nature of ethical criticism, I argue, offers new reasons to prefer moderate actual intentionalism to hypothetical intentionalism. I conclude by arguing for the necessity of broadening our conception of ethical criticism.

This article sketches a commonplace yet neglected epistemic puzzle raised by the diversity of our film-viewing practices. Because our appreciative practices allow for variability in the " instances " of cinematic works we engage, many of our experiential encounters with those works are flawed or impoverished in a number of ways. The article outlines a number of ways in which instances of cinema can vary – including, for example, in terms of color, score, and aspect ratio. This variability of instances of cinema and, hence, the variability in our experiences of a cinematic work raise potential problems around normative questions of interpretation and evaluation.

According to comic moralism, moral flaws make comic works less funny or not funny at all. In contrast, comic immoralism is the view that moral flaws make comic works funnier. In this article, I argue for a moderate version of comic immoralism. I claim that, sometimes, comic works are funny partly in virtue of their moral flaws. I argue for this claim—and artistic immoralism more generally—by identifying artistically valuable moral flaws in relevant actions undertaken in the creation of those works. Underlying this argument is the idea that such generative actions are partly constitutive of a work's identity, and, therefore, they may affect the ethical value of an artwork either positively or negatively, and they are the proper objects of ethical appraisal

This essay suggests that television aesthetics, as a research project, would benefit from attending to relevant theoretical debates in philosophical aesthetics. One reason for this is that assumptions about the ontology of television artworks are already embedded in our critical practices. We ought to be more aware of what these assumptions are and state them more explicitly. Moreover, I argue, for debates in television aesthetics to get off the ground, we need to ensure we bring the largely the same ontological assumptions to the table. We need to roughly agree about how television works are identified and individuated to ensure we are talking about the same works and that our debates are coherent. Referring to television works as 'texts' can make their ontology seem radically different from what our common creative and critical practices suggest, but I argue that a more precise use of language will help clarify ontological matters. Furthermore, I argue that the tacit ontological conceptions embedded in our creative and critical practices cannot be overturned by revisionist theories; rather, they actually determine the sort of ontological things to which we refer with terms like ‘episode’ and ‘series’. I conclude by attempting to show that our standard critical practices involve the tacit assumption that successfully realized artistic intentions establish the spatio-temporal boundaries of television works.