On Criticism -- Noël Carroll

Although most readers of this book will be philosophers, scholars of the arts and humanities, and critics by profession, anybody who has ever evaluated a work of art and reflected on that evaluation and those of others will profit from a reading. Carroll sets out his arguments with clarity and without jargon.

Carroll claims that the main business of criticism is not so much interpretation or contextualization as evaluation. Critics can interpret, contextualize, analyze, describe , and classify a work, but these activities are critical only insofar as they provide reasons for an evaluation of a work. This evaluation turns on an assessment of whether in any given artwork the artist has achieved the artistic aims they intended.

Carroll also argues for the objectivity of critical judgements; he is particularly concerned to dismantle the understanding of aesthetic evaluation as being centrally concerned with beauty.

With regard to Carroll's main claim, a large literature on intentionalism in aesthetics exists. I will note here that although he does refute those critiques inspired by a crude empiricism, he does not give adequate consideration to the difficulty of giving an account of what specific intentions might be; these difficulties might include problems between distinguishing conscious and unconscious intentions, the presence of multiple and possibly irreconcilable intentions, and the possibility that intentions might change during the creation of an artwork. These difficulties are compounded in the case of artworks that are the creation of popular culture industries, where the presence of multiple creators and commercial incentives complicate talk of a straightforward "artist's intention". This relative neglect is odd in view of the author's background in the aesthetics and criticism of film.

As far as Carroll's claims regarding the objectivity of criticism is concerned, much will ride on Carroll's arguments that the conventions of particular genres can provide principles which in turn can ground reasons for declaring an artwork a successful or otherwise example of that genre. Although much more can be said on the topic, Carroll does here offer a way of getting a discussion of evaluation beyond the bare affirmation of 'it's all just subjective preference!"

Not a new book -- it came out in 2009 - but still worth your time if you have even the slightest interest in the arts.

#Criticism #NoelCarroll #Aesthetics #Philosophy #Intentionalism #Art

theguardian.com/education/2026…

I see that the philosopher Malcolm Budd has died recently.

Funnily enough, I have just been reading his 1985 "Music and the Emotions", which attracted my attention because of its chapter on Susanne Langer's theory of music outlined in "Philosophy in a New Key".

I'm less convinced than is the obituarist that Budd "demolished" Langer's claims; although he raises important questions, I think someone sympathetic to Langer's approach can modify and develop her theory so as to meet the objections Budd raises. I need, though, to think and read more about the arguments regarding music and the emotions.

One of the larger problems of "Music and the Emotions" is its inadequate account of the phenomenology or the "what it's likeness" of emotions, moods, and feelings. This inadequacy is related, I suspect, to his limiting the possible content of thought to the propositional:

>> ...there is no thought which has a content which cannot be represented in language, there is no difficulty in principle of characterising precisely the particular nature of a feeling. << (112-113)

This limit seems mistaken to me, and Langer's distinction between discursive and presentational symbols cannot simply be ruled out by fiat.

I wonder whether the analytic tradition of philosophy within which Budd worked constricted his thinking about the phenomenology of the emotions and nonpropositional semiotics.

#Philosophy #MalcolmBudd #MusicAndTheEmotions #Aesthetics #SuzanneLanger #Semiotics

any recommendations for modernist depictions of agriculture and food production?

i've included some example images below.

some keywords:
* mechanized agriculture
* industrial farming
* industrial food production
* farm as factory
* farm modernization
* chemical agriculture
* green revolution

i've got the following materials on my to-read list:

* "every farm a factory: the industrial ideal in american agriculture" by deborah fitzgerald
* Ch. 8 of "seeing like a state": "Taming Nature: An Agriculture of Legibility and Simplicity" by james c. scott
* "Farming according to 'the laws of beauty': Aesthetics and agriculture" by david cooper (academia.edu/14380031/Farming_…)
* "the american technological sublime" by david nye (not sure if it has anything about agriculture specifically)
* "the machine in the garden: technology and the pastoral" by leo marx

if you're familiar with any written works looking at this kind of aesthetic specifically, i'd love to hear about it.

also, if you have suggestions for archives (online or irl) that might have more materials like this, i'm all ears.

#sundaylibrarian #history #art #ArtHistory #agriculture #GreenRevolution #food #aesthetics #modernism #industrialization #ResearchLibrarian