By John Valentine
The following article presents a debate about the distinction, if any, between art and craft. I have chosen the lead-in reference to the twin monsters that threatened Odysseus in Homer’s classic work The Odyssey, even though the philosophical debate about art and craft contains nothing threatening and is certainly not a matter of ‘choosing [...]
By John Valentine
Wabi-Sabi is a classic and well-known style of Japanese craftsmanship dating back at least as far as the 14th century. Unfortunately, its definition has become a cliché in the art world and its deeper philosophical dimensions are often overlooked or under-appreciated. The standard explanation is superficial at best: “A beauty [...]
By John Valentine
It is not my intent in this short essay to conduct an in-depth critique of E.H. Gombrich’s masterful work in the psychology of perception and its relation to figurative drawing. His book Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation is justifiably famous. Rather, my goal is to [...]
By John Valentine
For the purposes of this essay, I shall define expressionism-à la the Romantic movement of the 19th century-as the theory that one of the main functions of artworks, if not their very essence, is that they somehow ‘contain,’ ‘suggest,’ or ‘give voice to’ human feelings. I shall not be [...]
By John Valentine
There have been many attempts to capture and analyze this elusive animal in the history of philosophical thought. Plato and Aristotle, for example, took the route of necessary and sufficient conditions. That is, they assumed that for any item correctly to be designated as art it had to be 1) [...]
By John Valentine
Thesis: Modernist standards of objectivity in aesthetic evaluation are illusory. (Consider Lyotard’s “…incredulity with respect to all metanarratives.”) Art evaluation cannot logically proceed via the traditional deductive model.
Conclusion: The only relevant role for art critics today is not rational evaluation by way of reason-giving, but rather the function of the scout [...]
By John Valentine
Let me begin by confessing considerable agnosticism about the essence and/or definition of art and beauty. I shall not attempt to deal with that issue in this essay. Rather, I want to look at some of the nets or narrative stories about art and beauty experiences that some scientists and some [...]
