Devoir de Philosophie

Artistic interpretation

Publié le 22/02/2012

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« are automatically devoid of artistic worth, nor even that the fact of forgery is itself grounds for aestheticreappraisal, though these claims have sometimes been made.

It will be argued merely that the misrepresentationinvolved in a forgery is likely to have resulted in some other fact about the work being obscured, where thediscovery of this other fact would justifiably lead to an aesthetic reappraisal.

The forger, in art and elsewhere,typically presents an object with a certain appearance, and hopes that we will make a plausible but erroneousinference from this appearance to certain other properties - its having been made by a certain person at a certaintime and place, for example.

If the aesthetic features of a work depend entirely on the appearance the forgeryreally has, and not on those inferred properties the forger hopes we will believe it has, forgery would have noaesthetic significance.

Thus the visual appearance of van Meegeren's Emmaus , the word-sequence of the Malley poems, the ordering of musical notes in a Kreisler 'Mozart' piece, are evident features of these works.

If they alonedetermine the aesthetic value of the work, the forger will not have practised any aesthetic deception.

It seems wemust say either that forgery is aesthetically irrelevant, or that the aesthetic qualities of the work depend on morethan its evident features alone.

Someone unwilling to say either might appeal to an argument of Goodman's.Goodman claims that the best account we can give of the idea of two pictures looking exactly alike is one restrictedto occasions of observation, that is, 'A and B are indistinguishable for me now '.

So the fact that B is a forgery, though currently indistinguishable by me from A, may still be an aesthetically relevant fact for me now, becausethat fact will contribute to my future looking, and may result in my being able to see a difference between them.Even accepting Goodman's restriction of the notion of sameness of appearance, this argument is doubtful.

To claimthat the fact that one item is a forgery and the other is not constitutes an aesthetic difference because it may lead to the discovery of a difference of appearance seems to conflate possible and actual differences.

If knowingthat B is a forgery does lead me to notice a difference in appearance between A and B I may conclude that A and Bdiffer aesthetically.

If I do not find such a difference, then I have no reason to say that A and B differ aesthetically,whatever skills and knowledge I acquire in the process of examining them - so long, that is, as appearance is allthat matters aesthetically.

If we are to establish the aesthetic significance of forgery we must abandon the ideathat appearance alone determines a work's aesthetic value.

A number of thought experiments have been suggestedin which nonperceptible factors can be seen to make a difference to the value, qua works of art, of perceptually indistinguishable objects.

To consider just the pictorial case: our judgment about this work's aesthetic success maycrucially depend on whom we think it depicts.

It may seem to capture the appearance and character of person Xvery successfully; when we learn that it is a picture of Y, our view may change.

Its being a picture of Y rather thanof X is not a feature of its appearance but of its history, and in particular of the history of its causal relations to Xand to Y.

Part of the impact of a work may consist in our recognition that it constitutes a strikingly originaldevelopment of style or genre; a picture identical in appearance but produced much later would seem not original,but nostalgic or dull.

Features of the work we would describe as elegant or delicate, which we thought had beenproduced by hand, would have little impact if we knew they were the product of a machine capable of producinglines of arbitrary thinness and complexity.

There is little one can say about the appearance of an object that wouldbe immune to these revisions based on a reassessment of the work's history.

A description of the particular coloursoccurring at particular places on the surface might be the only claim immune to such revisions.

One response to thesorts of examples just cited is to say that they show simply that, when we judge a work according torepresentational, art-historical or technical criteria, we are not adopting a properly aesthetic standpoint.

But it isunlikely that this narrowly aesthetic standpoint corresponds to the ways in which art works have traditionally beenjudged qua works of art, and its adoption would greatly impoverish our aesthetic discourse.

The natural geometric partition of a picture, which we can describe in terms of abstract lines and planes, often depends onrepresentational features, like the joined parts of a human body, that give salience to certain shapes.

To ignore therepresentational features of the picture is to be no longer able to see what is natural about the geometricdescription.

Apparently aesthetic predicates, such as 'is dynamic', when used for a painting, would not be aestheticin this narrow sense; as Ernst Gombrich has emphasized ( 1977 ), a work like Mondrian's Broadway Boogie-Woogie can seem dynamic because works in the class to which it is naturally compared, namely Mondrian's other works, arerather static.

Imagine Broadway Boogie-Woogie to have a different history, and it might be less appropriate to call it dynamic.

It is sometimes said that the upshot of our acquiring knowledge of the referential, art-historical andtechnical features of a work is that the object looks different to us from the way it had looked before we acquired that knowledge.

And so, the objection goes, the examples described above are not really counterexamples to thethesis that there is no aesthetic difference without a difference of appearance.

Rather, they are examples of theways in which the work's appearance itself depends on extrinsic factors.

If the objection were right, we should beable to answer the charge that forgery is aesthetically irrelevant immediately and without difficulty, saying simplythat, since objects with different histories look different, there can be no objection to re-evaluating a work whenwe come to know that its history has been falsified, because that will change its appearance.

However, theobjection misses the point.

To say that two objects are indistinguishable in appearance is not to say that how theylook to the viewer is independent of the viewer's beliefs about their histories.

A single object may look different tothe viewer on two occasions of looking if they learn something about its history between the times of looking, butthere is still a sense in which its appearance is unchanged.

The sense in which objects can look the same despitedifferences between them in respect of facts about reference, history and technique is this: there could be a copyof the Mona Lisa so similar to the original that no one would be able to tell, on the basis of merely looking, whether the copy had been substituted for the original.

The fact that, were the substitution pointed out, the copy wouldnow look different to you from the way it had looked before (and different from the way the original had looked) isno objection to the claim that copy and original look exactly the same.

It is in this sense of 'look the same' - beingan indiscernible substitute for - that there can be an aesthetic difference between works that look the same.

Wemay conclude, then, that objects with the same appearance may yet have distinct aesthetic properties, and thattherefore the aesthetic properties of the work are not fully determined by its appearance.

In that case, thedeception involved in forgery may result in the audience being misinformed about historical properties of the object. »

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