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Aesthetics and Abstract Painting: Two Views

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 February 2009

Ronald W. Hepburn
Affiliation:
King's College, Aberdeen

Extract

Aesthetic theories, like theories of morals, are roughly divisible into those that maintain an analytic neutrality and those that attempt to arrive at “first-order”, practical judgments. A philo sopher of language may confine the legitimate task of aesthetics to the clarification of talk about works of art and about the fashioning of works of art. But other aestheticians, perhaps a more numerous group, see their study as far more intimately related to art criticism, and as able, without the committing of naturalistic or any other fallacies, to reach particular aesthetic value-judgments. Between these extreme positions lies a great diversity of theories which, while clearly differentiating aesthetics from art criticism, still carry practical implications of a general kind. The conceptual scaffolding into which they fit the art-forms, their notion of what is central to aesthetic experience and what peripheral, their account of artistic creativity-all these can be indirectly evaluative, can subtly influence and alter one's responses to actual aesthetic objects.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1960

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References

page 98 note 1 Edited by Blissett, William, University of Toronto Press, 1953.Google Scholar

page 98 note 2 Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958.

page 101 note 1 A comprehensive analysis of MacCallum's approach would have to con-sider at this point his account of the concept of truth in relation to art. I hope to treat this topic (here excised for reasons of space) in a book of aesthetic studies.

page 103 note 1 Non-Objectivity is the Realm of Spirit, by Hilla Rebay, quoted MacCallum, P.47.

page 109 note 1 Contrast MacCallum, op. cit., p. 22, quoted supra, p. 103.