It's not clear to me that it is correct that Western art--even in media such as sculpture and painting--is indeed historically such an individual creation. In the Renaissance, there were workshops, with masters and apprentices; some contemporary artists, such as Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons, have had certain of their works fabricated by others; the sculptor Richard Serra has his large steel pieces cast by industrial foundries. This is not to deny that the idea of the artist as individual creator doesn't persist, and that it doesn't capture the practice of many artists: I do, however, think that this very idea has a history that might well merit investigation that could illuminate its origin and power.

Hello, Callum; thanks for your question. Before Kant, there was a tradition in Enlightenment thinking about the nature of beauty and how we are able to perceive it. This tradition often referred to what was called the "faculty of taste" to distinguish this form of perception from other so-called faculties. The history runs roughly from Lord Shaftesbury, through Hutcheson, Burke, Hume, and then through Kant to Schopenhauer. A useful overview of this trajectory is in a book by George Dickie called _Evaluating Art_.

Yours,

Mitch Green

One obvious difference is that the original is 'scarcer' and thus the laws of supply and demand lead it to become 'more valued'. Also, the original has at least one potentially valuable attribute the replica does not have, the attribute of being 'made by the original artist.' Finally, it seems to me that most appreciators of art will deny your main premise... the claim that there is such a thing as an 'exact replica' of art.

There is quite a good literature on aesthetics that gets at spirituality. I co-authored a recent book (out last year) with the American artist Jil Evans: The image in mind (Continuum) that gets at the aesthetic dimension of different ways of viewing the world (principally theism and naturalism) and we have a co-edited book Turning Images with Oxford that deals with aesthetics and religion / spirituality. An older book which has an excellent collection of different thinkers is: Art, Creativity, and the Sacred edited by Diane Apostolos-Cappadona. Gordon Graham has a good book: The Re-enchantment of the Word (OUP 2007), and Oxford has published an amazing series of five books on aesthetics and theology or the sacred by David Brown. It is disappointing that the Routledge volume did not include more on spirituality, as many of those who contributed to aesthetics historically and quite recently have had spiritual concerns. Plato's dialogue on beauty, the Symposium, is partly about the ascent of the soul to the higher beauties, and it deeply impacted subsequent religious thinkers and artists. Three quite diverse thinkers from the 20th century who thought of aesthetics in spiritual terms include Kandinsky, Dewey, and Tolstoy. Good wishes!

The question of the relation between the judgments of professional critics and those of 'people on the street', as it were, especially with respect to works of mass culture such as movies and--albeit, I think, to a much lesser extent--pop songs, television, and also literature (which I think, even in its 'literary' as opposed to 'pulp' or 'genre' incarnations, is now properly considered part of mass culture)--is a very interesting question, which raises general issues about the reception of art (including 'high' art such as photography, painting, sculpture, theater, etc.), as well as about the relation between art and commerce.

It is true that many 'well-received' films have not performed 'well' at the box office--if by 'well' here one means something like making the list of top-ten grossing films now widely referred to by media outlets (a relatively new phenomenon, I might add)--despite receiving considerable critical acclaim. Olivier Assayas's five-hour film, Carlos, which, if I remember correctly, was judged in the annual year-end round-up published by Film Comment to be the best film of 2010--an accurate judgment, to my mind, for what it's worth--had miniscule box office receipts. However, it should be noted, first, that the film wasn't widely released (even the shortened version of the film wasn't widely released), and hence its gross box-office receipts aren't an especially good guide to how well it did at the box office: more telling would be its per-screen average. But other films lauded by critics don't even make it into theaters outside of New York City, Los Angeles, and a few other select metropolitan areas; still other films are never released for theatrical distribution. So one reason that films lauded as the best of any given year may not do well at the box office as others is because many of them don't even have the opportunity to draw box-office receipts. By contrast, since the Hollywood movie industry is an industry--albeit one that also produces works of art, such as, for example, Wall-E--its eye is on the bottom line (as are the eyes of studios who produce shows for television, which are, arguably, vehicles for bringing advertisements to the attention of potential consumers), and its aim is to sell as many tickets as possible, by appealing to as many people as possible.

Historically, however, 'new' or innovative art has been a hard sell--the booing of the ballet Afternoon of a Faun is a classic example, as is the general public bewilderment at the work of the 'Impressionists', shows of whose work are now art museum cash cows, 'blockbusters', even: consequently, it is unsurprising that studios would not want to risk the expense of putting innovative, experimental work into even relatively wide release--unless the filmmaker is very well known, vide Terence Malick--and not recouping their investment. Moreover, while many 'big' studio movies--e.g., summer 'tent pole' movies--have been criticized, and, I think, rightly so, by critics for not being very good despite selling lots of tickets, there are 'blockbusters', such as the movies in the first Star Wars tetralogy, or Jaws, or, more recently Avatar, that are recognized by critics as interesting and important works of art in certain respects as well. (To be sure, in the past three decades, there has been something of a backlash against the 'blockbusterization' of Hollywood, which reflects both a nostalgia for the 'rebel' filmmakers of the seventies, when innovative film was made within the studio system, as well as a concern that too close an eye on the bottom line is impeding the development of film as an art form--a worry that I think is misplaced--or leading viewers to form expectations for film that make it difficult for more 'difficult' films to receive an audience--a worry that may be in order, but which applies, mutatis mutandis to literature, without any especially deletorious effects for that art form, although the major difference is that it is far more expensive to create a film than a novel, although even that is beginning to change as technology changes.)

I don't think, however, that in cases when there is a wide divergence between critical assessment of a movie and its gross revenues (from the box office, DVD sales, rentals, etc.), that this reflects a genuine disagreement between critics and the general public. Critics may be assessing whether the work in question is a good or interesting example of the art of film; it's not clear that the large crowds who make a film a 'blockbuster' see it because they want to see the development of the medium of film: they may just want to be entertained, and a more 'difficult', 'experimental' film may just not be very entertaining. (One has to be in the right frame of mind to attend to Meek's Cutoff; one doesn't have to be mentally prepared in the same way to see Planet of the Apes. This is not, of course, to say that there weren't many great things about both the original and the remake of Planet of the Apes.) Grosses simply track how many people paid to see a film in some format; they can, but needn't track the quality of a film. But critics don't, I think, assess every film in the same way: even 'highbrow' critics do not reflexively prefer 'difficult', 'experimental' film to 'genre' film: indeed, to my mind, in judging a film, a good critic should take into account what kind of work a film is meant to be. And there are, of course, different ways of being a critic--although, sadly, there are fewer and fewer film critics, just as there are fewer and fewer book critics, being employed these days. And the merits of a critic, are, I think, as variable as the merits of films: certain critics may appeal to certain people, other critics to others.

But let a thousand flowers bloom, I say: let there be different types of critics, different types of films, and let them be as accessible as possible to the viewing public!

A great question. It has never been the case that the role of 'artist' and 'viewer' have been as clear cut as we would like. First of all, historically, many 'artists' were anonymous craftspeople who probably worked collaboratively -- and collaborative art works have returned more recently as an important category within the art world. Second, in the 20th century, many artists experimented with strategies designed to introduce either randomness into their works, or allow their 'unconscious' selves to be expressed.

On the side of the viewer, we tend to think of the viewer as individual, and as neutral. By 'neutral' I mean not adding anything to the work or contributing anything to its meaning. But both concepts are clearly ideal situations, at best. Theatrical works, for example, rely upon the viewers being a crowd and moreover behaving as a crowd. Related, a great deal of philosophical work has pursued the idea that the 'reception' of the work is not to be located in an individual or group of individuals, but is a historical phenomenon. A work of art designed to shock an audience in 1910 is no longer found shocking -- if the 'shock' was part of the work originally, then it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the work of art has been changed by the change in its viewers. Similarly, the neutrality of the viewer is questionable, since individual likes and dislikes, and more importantly different types of background knowledge, will greatly influence the event of viewing. So, for example, a Medieval religious fresco will be an entirely different object for a casual tourist as for an expert in iconography.

So, arguably at least, the situation you describe with respect to installation art is just an exacerbation of, or a making explicit of, what was already the case: the work of art is not primarily a physical object, but is rather an event of some kind.

I hope it is possible, otherwise I am in trouble. As a boxing trainer and writer, I have found a number of bouts to be of staggering beauty. I don't believe that I use the same criterion of beauty for boxing as I do for, say, sunsets or for that matter poetry. I'm not sure what would follow if there were indeed something like harmony that was present in all things that we judged to be beautiful, but it doesn't seem to me as if there is any such thing. Thanks.

It's pretty clear that the rules of chess don't count as a work of art. That's not a comment on the virtues or beauty of the rules; it's a comment on what we count as an artwork. As it is, particular chess matches/basketball games... also don't count, though we might get a good deal of aesthetic pleasure from contemplating them.

Is there anything necessary about this? I'd say no. The view of what counts as art that I find most plausible is some version of what's called the institutional view. Art is a human practice -- an institution in the broad sense. Though there are no strict criteria, to count as an artwork, something has to be related to the conventions, practices, etc. of art in the right sort of way. But just what that comes to can and does change.

This might raise chicken/egg worries, but those aren't actually very pressing. There are undeniable cases of artworks, artists, art museums, art critics, art afficianados, etc. To use the not-entirely-satisfactory term, there is an artworld. It may be that most artworks were deliberately made to be objects of aesthetic contemplation, but not everything that we count as an artwork fits that criterion, and not everything that rewards aesthetic contemplation counts as an artwork. More generally, what counts keeps expanding. Performance art is a relatively recent form. So (for better or worse) are conceptual art and what we quaintly call "found art." Seeing art as a matter of what "the artworld" sees as art helps make sense of this. But where does it leave games and their rules?

To repeat what we started with, the rules of games like chess or baseball aren't counted as artworks and neither are particular matches. Video games (not their rules but the finished products, graphics, sound and all) probably aren't either, though I'm a little less confident of that. But all this could change. It's not hard to imagine a new performance artform developing that incorporates the playing of games. And though it seems less likely, we can't rule out a priori the possibility of an artform whose works are sets of rules for games. It depends on what happens amongst artists, critics, scholars, museums and consumers of art like you and me. (Yes, non-experts aren't just shut out. What they do or don't take an interest in, support, talk about... isn't irrelevant even though it doesn't settle matters.)

The larger moral that those of us who like the institutional view carry away is that what counts as an artwork isn't the sort of thing we can settle by armchair contemplation. It depends on what people do and think, and it's very hard to say for sure where the process will go.

Most aestheticians make the distinction between aesthetics and philosophy of art, with "aesthetics" being the wider term and "philosophy of art" the narrower one. "Philosophy of art" is only the philosophy of works of art or art objects as they are unappealingly called these days. In other words, these philosophers accept that it is not only works of art to which the terms of aesthetic appraisal apply, such as "attractive", "unattractive", "lovely", not lovely", "unlovely", "majestic", "grubby", "oily", and on and on, without end. They also apply to the human face and the human form, to nature and parts of nature, including natural landscapes, the sea, etc. There is practically no word, I believe, that cannot one way or another be used as a term of aesthetic appraisal. The aesthetic is everywhere; a happy thought.

HIstorically and today, most who practice aesthetics treat the aesthetic as involving more than works of art. The term "aesthetics" was introduced in the 19th cedntury to stand for sensory experience and only later came to be used in a way that was specific to works of art, but most of the important works in the field of aesthetics (like Kant's Critique of Judgment) think of (for example) treat the natural world in aesthetic terms. The definition of "aesthetic" is not air tight, however, but I suggest its most common usage denotes the emotive features of objects. An excellent book on the aesthetic in general, and works of art in particular, is Gary Iseminger's The Aesthetic Function of Art (Cornell University Press, 2004). While Dewey did a great job in highlighting the aesthetics of life outside the world of art (he was highly critical of some of the museum cultures of his day), some philosophers are swayed by what they see as non-aesthetic features of artwork. On this front, you might want to consider Noel Caroll's excellent book Beyond Aesthetics. On such matters, I am more with Iseminger and seek to defend an aesthetic account of art in the book Aesthetics: A Beginner's Guide (Oxford; OneWorld Press, 2011).