Art and the Aesthetic. The speaker is Professor Frank Sibley.

Professor Frank SibleyThe

question I want to raise here is about the genesis of the concept of the aesthetic.Do human
beings derive the notion of aesthetic experience from the arts and the work of artists, or
would aesthetic experience be possible, perhaps in relation to natural objects, even if there
were no art? Which, in short, is the more fundamental notion, art or the aesthetic?During the
eighteenth century, many writers on aesthetics, Hutcheson, Hume, Burke, and Kant for
example, concentrated quite as much on the beauty, ugliness, sublimity, and other aesthetic
qualities of natural phenomena as on the arts. With Hegel this changed. Since his time, writers
on aesthetics, though not without exceptions, have largely focused on the arts. The titles of
many of the best-known works and collections indicate this: Art & Experience, What is Art?
The Principles of Art, Art and its Objects, Languages of Art, Philosophy looks at the Arts. Even
works with the title Aesthetics, like Croce’s or Beardsley’s, are predominantly concerned with
the arts. Much recent discussion in aesthetics, indeed, has narrowed to disputing, in even
more detail, why and whether the productions of the present century, from objets trouvés
and ready-mades to automatic writing and aleatory music, are or are not art. It is true that,
with the recent emphasis on environmental, ecological, and preservation issues, this tide may
be turning and emphasis falling again on aesthetic aspects of natural phenomena. For many
of the arguments of environmentalists are probably as much aesthetic as they are moral or
practical in character.But it is not these switches of emphasis and fashion that I aim to discuss.
The crux of my question concerns not fashionable emphasis but logical priorities. Is the
concept of the aesthetic logically prior to, or logically derivative from, the concept of art?
More colloquially, could there be art if we possessed no notion of aesthetic experience, or
does the very existence of art depend upon our having this notion?In the introduction to his
lectures on Fine Art, Hegel wrote, ‘the beauty of art stands higher than Nature’ and he
concentrated thereafter on an account of the arts. Many others since have contended
explicitly that the arts have a logical priority over the aesthetics of nature. One recent writer
of importance holds that ‘once the aesthetic attitude has been established on the basis of
objects produced under the concept of art, we can extend it beyond this base’. Another
writes, ‘when we judge a person’s or a flower’s beauty we are judging them within certain
artificial canons, canons that we develop from our acquaintance with the arts’. A fact that
helps lend colour to these contentions is the realization that the way we see nature is often
influenced, if not determined, by the way artists have depicted it. We may see, it is said,
landscapes through Constable’s eyes, clouds and sun through Turner’s, water or flowers or
dancers through Monet’s or Van Gogh’s or Degas’s. But I believe the contention that art is the
prior notion may have little to support it. To my knowledge no convincing argument has ever
been offered to prove it. Indeed I want to suggest that no such argument could be given. I
even think that the exact opposite is almost certainly true, that is, that the concept of art is
logically secondary or dependent on the concept of the aesthetic. I shall offer an argument
for that in a moment. But even without argument it might surely seem, if one reflects,
inconceivable, or at least wholly unlikely, that there could be no aesthetic awareness of
natural phenomena, of the beauty or ugliness of human faces and bodies, of animals, of
sunrise and sunset, of clouds, the sea, meadows and mountains unless some art already
existed, or some deliberate attempt to make articles of aesthetic interest had already
occurred.However, it is arguments rather than likelihoods that concern me here. Here is an
argument. If one considers the concept of art, at least that concept which underlies the
obvious or central or paradigm examples of art over many centuries, it seems impossible that
art should not be thought of as the production of things, audible, visual, or linguistic, which
are attempts to create, if not beauty, at least things of some aesthetic interest, and this no
matter what additional purposes they might have been meant to serve. But if this apparently
obvious supposition is correct, the argument seems simple. It is impossible to have the
intention to do or produce X, whatever X is, without already possessing some notion of X. I
cannot set myself to produce, say, a sandcastle without having some notion of what a
sandcastle is. Of course, I might be messing about with sand, a spade, a bucket, and happen
by chance to produce something like, apparently indistinguishable from, a sandcastle; but
unless I possessed that concept I did not, and could not have, set out or intended to produce
that particular result. It would be like Charles Lamb’s story of the accidental discovery of the
delights of roast pig. Similarly, someone, adult or child, even an orang-utan, even a machine
randomly operating, might produce something that happened to be of aesthetic interest. But
if art is something produced with the intention, or even merely the hope, that it will be
aesthetically satisfying, then the concept of aesthetic experience, enjoyment, satisfaction, or
whatever, must logically precede the concept of art. The argument rests, then, on the claim
that any acceptable account of the concept of art, as that term has been used to cover the
familiar so-called fine arts, sees art as aiming at some kind of aesthetic achievement. But if
that is correct, it follows directly that some notion of the aesthetic must have an origin, an
existence, independent of the arts, not vice versa, and aesthetic experience of non-artistic
phenomena, whether artefacts or natural objects, is logically prior to interest in, or even the
existence of, the arts.This argument, notice first, is entirely about a logical priority between
concepts; it is not an argument about priority in time. In a similar way, the notion of a straight
line is logically prior to the notion of a triangle; i.e., there could not be triangles unless there
were straight lines, even though the converse is possible. But that of course does not prove
that there were straight lines before there were triangles. Secondly, another thing this
argument does not prove: it does not prove that people took an aesthetic interest in natural
objects before they took an aesthetic interest in man-made artefacts. It is perfectly
conceivable that the first time anyone experienced aesthetic delight it was delight at a
humanly made artefact, not a natural object. But, if the argument is correct, such an artefact
was not a work of art, any more than the outcome of my random activities on the seashore
was a sandcastle. My pile of sand might be called a sandcastle by others; but only because
they, unlike me, possess that concept. Thirdly, the argument does not deny that you or I might
have acquired our notion of aesthetic experience from contact with works of art; only that
whoever created those works must have had some prior notion of the aesthetic.

Second Part (indicado como Independent study)

Professor Frank SibleyThe argument just given employed, as a crucial premise, that nothing
is art that is not made with at least some aesthetic intention. This account of the notion of art
– as that notion occurs in connection with the fine arts, not with such skills as, say, the art of
healing, the art of public speaking, or the art of plumbing – this account I believe
unquestionably fits those long periods of history during which most of our indubitable and
paradigmatic instances of the fine arts have been produced. But one can immediately foresee
that objections to this premise might be made, based both upon recent developments in the
arts and upon the earliest examples of art, say, cave paintings. Take recent developments
first. It may be said that this supposition about art fails to fit many of the developments of
the twentieth century. There have been works which are chance or random happenings,
aleatory music, automatic writing, objets trouvés, ready-mades, computer productions,
works over which the artist exerted little control or direction, or where there was no intention
of producing things of aesthetic interest. Many distinctions can be made of course.
Sometimes artists have left things to chance but hoped for and selected and salvaged
anything of aesthetic significance; but in so far as they select the ‘worthwhile’ results and
reject the ‘worthless’, they are still, by this selection, often intending to present items,
differently arrived at, of aesthetic interest. But in other cases there has been the deliberate
intention or hope that what is produced or selected will be ugly, banal, pedestrian, without
traditional aesthetic values, will even be devoid of aesthetic interest altogether. Such
productions may be, and have been, described as artworks; indeed, whether they are
accepted as artworks depends on some kind of decision (though questions about criteria of
artistic success or excellence then obtrude). Perhaps these decisions have already been fairly
generally taken by the art world, though they may still be disputed by the general public;
perhaps again, the decisions will be reversed in fifty or a hundred years.Some contemporary
aestheticians have expended much energy discussing these interesting but – as I believe –
peripheral questions, even to the exclusion of other matters of importance in aesthetics. But
it is not my present concern to take sides on these topics, either over particular productions
or the criteria employed. The point at issue here is this. If there are those who, because of
these works, deny that aesthetic intent is essential to art, there is a ready reply to hand,
namely, that these developments are extensions of, and impossible without, the art against
which they are reacting. Attempts to produce works that lack aesthetic interest are parasitic
on the traditional concept. For it is as much a logical impossibility to intend something that
lacks aesthetic interest without having a concept of the aesthetic, as to intend something that
has aesthetic interest. Equally, the intention not to produce art, or to produce what is not art,
requires a conception of art. So, it seems, whether we allow these modern works to be new
forms of art or not, they all presuppose a familiar concept of art and therefore of the
aesthetic. Without the latter concept they could not exist. In so far as they are parasitic on
previous traditions, works, and concepts of art, they necessarily involve those concepts.The
position of early and prehistoric art is different in some ways, similar in others. In most cases
we have little idea why they were produced, what their makers had in mind, what intentions
they had, what purposes their productions were designed to serve. Speculation is that they
may have been for magic, religious, or practical purposes; since they are often in dark and
inaccessible places, like caves, it is possible they were not intended, so to speak, for
exhibition, contemplation, or to provide aesthetic satisfaction. But we do not know. On the
other hand, perhaps their makers did find aesthetic delight in them. Often, certainly, they
have remarkable aesthetic qualities which we can appreciate, whether their makers did or
not. For this reason, and perhaps because it seems unlikely that such works were made by
people with no appreciation of, or intention to produce, these aesthetic features, we give
them the benefit of the doubt and call them works of art. Thus, if their makers did have some
concept of the aesthetic in making them, they may have been, even for them, works of art. If
they had no such concept – and we are uncertain, since we do not know if they did any of the
things we characteristically do with artworks – then they were perhaps either like doodles or
my sandcastles above, things produced for no purpose, or else things produced with quite
other intentions. In which case, whatever we say about them and however we treat them,
they were not works of art; it is we who choose so to treat them. They are artefacts that
happen to have aesthetic interest. But who cares, except perhaps anthropologists, whether
they were the art of those early people or not? We treat them as art much as Duchamp and
others in this century have treated non-art artefacts as art, as ready-mades.This, incidentally,
provokes a further thought. If we have, perhaps for centuries, treated what were in fact non-
art artefacts of earlier times as artworks, then ready-mades or something very similar, far
from being an innovation of this century, have been around for a very long time. What
distinguishes them is that, with prehistoric objects, we treat artefacts as artworks without
knowing for certain whether they were or not, whereas with modern ready-mades,
something is deliberately treated as art though known not to have been produced as such.I
must stress however that my argument is not really about history or prehistory. At some
period in time, presumably, notions of the aesthetic (however named or unnamed –
appropriate behaviour and forms of appreciation would be enough) first occurred or
developed; some animals from which we evolved presumably lacked these notions. But
whether historically this happened before or after the epoch, say, of cave paintings, whatever
was produced before this happened was not art in that familiar central sense which underlies
the art of many centuries.If the foregoing argument is sound, it follows that, far from the
aesthetic being logically parasitic on art, the reverse is the case. But the argument rests on
the premise I stated, that art, paradigmatically, is something produced with aesthetic intent.
So what if that premise is rejected, and the concept of art is thought of as involving no
aesthetic intention, a concept little different from that occurring in, say, the art of the
wheelwright or the art of healing? That would still not serve to establish the position I
questioned at the outset, that art has a logical priority over the aesthetic. To deny that I have
given a conclusive proof of the one view provides no proof or evidence for the other view.
We would simply be left with the notion of artworks as artefacts which by chance possess and
are enjoyed for their aesthetic qualities, together with a merely factual, historical, but
unsupported assertion – that aesthetic interest in artefacts preceded aesthetic interest in
natural objects. But besides there being, as far as I know, no evidence for this latter, it seems,
as I said earlier, extremely improbable: improbable when we consider the extent to which the
basis and origin of aesthetic interests seem even now, as probably they always have been,
deeply rooted in our responses to natural objects.If we ask which objects human beings most
widely respond to with either satisfaction at their beauty or revulsion at their ugliness, it is
probably their own kind: human faces and bodies, male and female. We can think too of the
simplest aesthetic responses – ‘How beautiful!’ ‘How pretty!’ ‘How lovely!’ ‘How ugly!’ – that
people have to flowers, animals, butterflies, birds, coloured stones, skies, sun, moon, stars,
all things striking enough to attract attention, and evoke admiration and wonder. Almost
certainly, also, such things are among those that children early respond to with pleasure,
spontaneously or under our encouragement. Many of these responses can hardly be anything
but primitive or simple instances of aesthetic interest. And, incidentally again, the delight that
leads primitive people – and children and not so primitive people – to collect, and surround
or adorn themselves with, coloured stones, feathers, etc., suggests that objets trouvés also
have a long history before the twentieth century. None of this of course denies that, once art
is in existence, some of a child’s most primitive aesthetic responses might be elicited by
artworks.Once our attention has been redirected thus away from art and on to natural
phenomena, it becomes easier to realise just how widespread are the aesthetic interests of
ordinary people. A considerable part of most people’s satisfaction, not only in natural
phenomena but in many non-artistic human activities, both work and play, is in some
measure fairly obviously aesthetic, whether people explicitly realise the fact or not. Consider
how much satisfaction and fascination people find in plants and gardening – witness the
proliferation of the nursery industry – in animals, whether pets, in zoos, or in the wild, in
travel to places of notable natural beauty; and it is no surprise that there is such widespread
interest in the photography and television that shows colourful tropical fish, birds, coral reefs,
magnified studies of insects, crystals, and so on; the list is endless. Some of this interest is
mere curiosity, or fascination with what is strange, some is scientific; but undoubtedly much
of the wonder and admiration is aesthetic. So is, whether it is realised or not, much of the
interest in popularly appreciated games and sports – football, cricket, tennis, ice skating, and
so on – where economy, grace, and perfection of movement and action are admired. These
and many others are activities to which considerable numbers of people respond with some
measure of aesthetic pleasure – people who often have no significant acquaintance with or
response to the arts. When such interests, quite outside the fine arts, play so extensive a role
in human cultures, interests which can hardly be anything but aesthetic, perhaps our
investigations in aesthetics should focus at least as much on the nature and origins of these
aesthetic satisfactions as on the more recherché questions about art. For, by comparison,
interest in the arts – at least the highly developed arts that aestheticians largely focus on – is
almost certainly a fairly restricted and minority interest.