Ted Nannicelli

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 offers an account of the relationship between screenplay and film, and it does so by comparing this relationship to the relationships that hold between other sets of instructions and artworks: score and musical work, theatrical script and theatrical work, architectural plan and architectural work. I argue that musical scores and theatrical scripts are work-determinative documents—manuscripts whose existence entails the existence of musical works and theatrical works, respectively, and which determine the facts about what those works are like. On the contrary, I argue that architectural plans and screenplays are not work-determinative because they alone do not entail the existence of any architectural work or film. Nevertheless, I conclude that this difference has no bearing upon art status: theatrical scripts are almost always artworks in their own right, musical scores almost never are, and architectural plans are in certain cases. This conclusion suggests that although the relationship between theatrical script and theatrical work is quite different from that between screenplay and film, there is no reason to think that screenplays cannot be literary artworks in their own right

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.

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 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 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.

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 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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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 and the music composed for and sung by the castrati.

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.

"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"--

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.

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.

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.