In my previous posts on Georg Bertram’s Art as Human Practice I have reconstructed and sketched two versions of his account of art, a short version that turns on the central claim that art is ‘an unassured practiced,’ and a longer and fuller version that claims that art is a practice marked by ‘self-referentiality’ wherein works actualize what Bertram calls ‘(generic) constellations’. And in my first post I tried to recover the motivations for his project, in particular the desire to capture the partial insights within two main lines of thinking about the arts: one which stresses the autonomy of art and the kinds of meaning that typically arise through engagement with artworks; and one which stresses the embeddedness of artistic practices within a society’s full range of practices, and with it the sense that artworks may affect practices other than artistic ones. In a highly provisional blogging conclusion, I would like to offer some critical remarks about Bertram’s views.
There is a great deal in the accounts with which I agree, and I’m particularly interested in the ways in which Bertram has assimilated into his account what seem to me to be two neglected points in art theories and in main lines of the philosophy of art. One frequently neglected point is that meaning in the arts is nothing (fully) propositional, and indeed cannot be thought of as finite or fully determinable. We cannot make sense of the idea that we have, with some set of propositions, however lengthy, exhausted the meaning of an artwork. This point was made by among others Richard Wollheim and Michael Podro; Bertram’s way of putting this point is that the process of interpretive engagement with and understanding of an artwork is indeed a non-finite process, one which moves within a field of tensions between grasping the work as exhibiting an order, and grasping the work as exhibiting materiality, or material elements in combinations. A second neglected thought is that in artworks there are no so to speak a priori meaning-bearing elements; rather part of what emerges in appropriately attuned engagement with an artwork is a sense of what is meaning-bearing, what is salient, and what is important. As I noted previously, Wollheim’s way of making this point was to say that artworks have a way of teaching you how to understand them.
On two points I would wish to criticize not so much Bertram’s account as his way of articulating his points. Firstly, it strikes me that at a number of points Bertram relies rather heavily upon sets of simple oppositions. I have is discussed the opposition ‘autonomy/heteronomy’; others include ‘determinate/indeterminate and dependent/independent. The latter oppositions play an important role in his characterization of the necessarily historical and traditional character of the arts. But these sorts of oppositions seem to me to fall short of the conceptual complexity needed to capture, say, the various ways in which artists work within traditions, in sustaining, altering, innovating, partially rejecting, intensifying, merging, etc., them. This criticism leads to a second one: Bertram gives no attention to any particular works. Bertram might reply that in this book he is providing a general philosophy of the arts; it would be a further task to take up his framework and develop an applied philosophy, or an account of a particular artform or genre. But this response strikes me as only partially forceful. Bertram stresses, quite rightly in my view, that the philosophy of art should not take as central the question ‘what is art?’, but rather the question ‘what is the value of art?’ But I do not see how one can answer the latter question without at least sketching the particular ways in which meaning arises in artworks, and so further that such meaningful artworks have value. So one would want more in Bertram’s account, such as the account Wollheim gives in Painting as an Art (1987) of primary and secondary meaning in painting practiced as an art, or of the account that Podro gave in Depiction (1998) of how artists sustain recognition and so provide works correlated with experiences that accrue meaningfulness in and through engagement with works.
It is not clear to me how telling these objections are to Bertram’s account. They seem to me more requests for further explication than anything that strikes at the heart of his project. I very much hope that his book will be widely read and discussed.