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Presentational Objects and their Interpretation
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 January 2010
Extract
The work of artists is to make works of art, and of theorists theoretical works. In our ordinary dealings with such things, elusive as ontologists may find them, we seem to know well enough in either instance how we should regard and handle them. Ontological questions are none the less raised: what species of entity may they be? It is a question, I confess, to which I could never respond with much enthusiasm. My own interest in art is more ordinary; I care about paintings and poems, about what serves to make them good or bad, about how we should look at or read them. Yet it may prove after all that the two issues are not wholly unrelated.
- Type
- Papers
- Information
- Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 6: Philosophy and The Arts , March 1972 , pp. 147 - 164
- Copyright
- Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 1972
References
page 147 note 1 Philosophical Investigations, I, § 373.Google Scholar
page 149 note 1 Wollheim, R., Art and Its Objects, p. 3.Google Scholar
page 152 note 1 Johnson, Samuel, Plays of William ShakespeareGoogle Scholar, Note on Hamlet, iv, v, 84.Google Scholar
page 152 note 2 Op. cit., p. 62.
page 152 note 3 A portico is very different from a temple front. The former presents no special problem. Gibbs himself had handled it wholly comfortably in his little chapel of St Peter's, Vere Street. The attempt to combine a steeple with a temple front is quite another matter, a temptation that was understandably strong. That can help to make Gibbs's failure intelligible; it could not possibly transform it into success. And, it seems, the pediment was anyway a feature Gibbs was never happy with. With no temple front, instead a semi-circular portico, in the west facade, it is the one inept feature marring the otherwise exquisite church of St Mary-le-Strand. And the podium-like ground floor of the Radcliffe Camera hardly does better.
page 153 note 1 In my paper ‘The excellence of Form in Works of Art’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, LXXI, 1971–1972, pp. 13–29.Google Scholar
page 154 note 1 The Principles of Art, p. 150.Google Scholar
page 154 note 2 Op. cit., vii, iv.
page 155 note 1 ‘Aesthetic Concepts’, British Journal of Aesthetics, x, iv, 1970, pp. 303–22.Google Scholar
page 156 note 1 Cf. Savile, Anthony, ‘The Place of Intention in the Concept of Art’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, LXIX, 1968–1969, p. 116.Google Scholar
page 159 note 1 Op. cit., p. 76
page 162 note 1 Op. cit., pp. 10–11