Part 2: The autonomy paradigm
As noted in my previous post, the philosopher Georg Bertram has recently published a notably original and innovative work in the philosophy of art, Art as a Human Practice. He argues that rightly understood art is a practice among other human practices, and one that is distinguished by (a) its self-reflective nature that (b) produces, in its characteristically successful instances, a provocation and challenge to other human practices. With (a) he claims to capture what is correct in formalist views of art, and with (b) what is correct in contextualist views. Before explicating and examining his positive views, it would be helpful to look at his criticisms of prior theories, as his positive account emerges from those criticisms. In the book he gives sustained attention to the recent general accounts of art of the American philosopher Arthur Danto and the German philosopher, as well as to the classic accounts of Kant and Hegel. Additionally, he examines more briefly the work of John McDowell on the nature of aesthetic characteristics and values, and that of Noel Carroll on the nature of the interpretation and criticism of art.
Each of Bertram’s critical discussions is sufficiently detailed so as to resist easy summary, but the conclusion that he reaches in each case is intelligible in abstraction from those accounts. Bertram argues that each of these existing accounts is vitiated by its acceptance of what he calls ‘the autonomy paradigm’ (p.16). The most basic feature of the autonomy paradigm is the theoretical treatment of art as ‘isolated’ from other human practices. Since Bertram agrees with the autonomy paradigm that art is a distinctive human practice, he accordingly thinks that the autonomy paradigm’s insistence on the isolation of art from other practices is one way of attempting to grasp this distinctiveness, but is nonetheless a simplification that distorts the basic nature of art. Firstly, the autonomy paradigm is adopted in a theoretical context wherein the leading question in the philosophy of art is taken to be ‘What is art?’ Each philosopher then produces a distinctive answer to the question. For example, Danto argues that something is a work of art if it (a) exhibits ‘aboutness’ (or as Bertram puts it, it ‘thematizes’ something), and (b) ‘embodies’ that ‘aboutness’ by possessing or employing (i) rhetoric, (ii) metaphor, and (iii) style. Bertram then notes that in each case when the philosopher has offered a definition of art, nothing has been said about the value of art. So in practice the autonomy paradigm treats the nature of art and the value of art as distinct questions. “The nature of art gets defined in isolation from its value.” (p.41)
Secondly, the autonomy paradigm treats those characteristics of a work the possession of which make it an artwork as comprising a finite and determinate set. On such accounts, something either is or isn’t a work of art. Bertram puts this point by saying that the autonomy paradigm defines art in terms of its objective features. (p.145) A characteristic consequence of this is the view of the interpretation and criticism of art as the mere explication of features that are simply found in the work. If the particular kind of meaning that an artwork embodies is simply found in a work, then there is nothing for interpretation to do but make manifest and salient that which is perhaps latent and obscure. If a philosopher such as Menke who is in the grips of the autonomy paradigm nonetheless rejects this conception of interpretation as mere explication, he is then forced into the equally dissatisfying alternative of claiming that artworks possess meaning only as a kind of non-conceptual, non-linguistic, indeterminate liveliness, the relation of which to the rest of human life is wholly unclear.
Bertram’s alternative account then must capture the thought that art does have a distinctive character that gives it a kind of autonomy, but not the one-sided and simplistic isolation of the autonomy paradigm. His proposal will start from the thought that the nature of art and the value of art are not conceptually distinct issues. The partial truth embodied in a reductivist account must be recovered and brought to bear on the autonomy of art rightly conceived. My next blog post will attempt to explicate Bertram’s positive account.
