I denna del av artikeln så kommer Wilber med en första beskrivning vad konst är ("What Is Art?"), och efter detta så kommer fyra olika avsnitt där fyra olika syn på konst avhandlas:
What Is Art?
The simplest and perhaps earliest view of the nature and meaning of art (and thus of its interpretation as well) is that art is imitative or representational: it copies something in the real world. The painting of a landscape copies or represents the real landscape. Plato takes this view of art in the Republic, where he uses the example of a bed: the painting of a bed is a copy of a concrete bed (which is itself a copy of the ideal Form of a bed). Notoriously, for Plato, this puts art in a rather bad position: it is making copies of copies of the Ideal, and is thus doubly removed and doubly inferior. Later theorists would "upgrade" this Platonic conception by maintaining that the true artist is actually copying the Ideal Forms directly, seen with the mind's eye, and thus is performing a "perfectionist" artistry—as Michelangelo said, "The beauty which stirs and carries up to heaven every sound intellect."
Aristotle likewise takes the view of art as imitative or copying the real world, and in one form or another this notion of art as mimesis has had a long and profound influence: the meaning of art is that which it represents.
The grave difficulty with this view, taken in and by itself, is that it unmistakably implies that the better the imitation, the better the art, so that a perfect copy would be perfect art, which lands art squarely in the province of trompe l'oeil and documentary photography: a good likeness on a driver's license photo would be good art. Moreover, not all art is representative or imitative: surrealist, minimalist, expressionist, conceptual, and so forth. So while some art has representative aspects, mimesis alone can account for neither the nature nor the value of art.
With the rise of the Enlightenment in Europe, two other major theories of the nature and meaning of art gained prominence, and they are both still quite influential today. Not surprisingly, these theories would spring respectively from the great rational and great romantic currents that were set in motion in the 17th and 18th centuries, and which, translated into the artistic domain, came to be known generally as formalist and expressivist (rational and romantic!).
And at this point, the question became, not so much what is art, but where is art?
Art Is in the Maker
If the nature, meaning, and value of art are not simply due to art's imitative capacity, perhaps the essence of art lies in its power to express something, and not simply to copy something. And indeed, in both the theory and practice of art, emphasis often began to turn from a faithful copying and representing and imitating—whether of religious icons or of a realistic nature—to an increasingly expressionistic stance, under the broad influence of the general currents of Romanticism. This view of art and its value was given strong and quite influential voice by theorists such as Benedetto Croce (Aesthetics), R.G. Collingwood (Principles of Art), and Leo Tolstoy (What is Art?).
The basic conclusion of these Romantic theorists: art is, first and foremost, the expression of the feelings or intentions of the artist. It is not simply the imitation of an external reality, but the expression of an internal reality. We therefore can best interpret art by trying to understand the original intention of the maker of the artwork itself (whether painter, writer, composer).
Thus, for Tolstoy, art is the "contagion of feeling." That is, the artist expresses feeling in the artwork which then evokes that feeling in us, the viewers; and the quality of the art is best interpreted by the quality of the feelings it expresses and "infects" us with. For Croce—arguably the most influential aesthetician of the 1900s—art is the expression of emotion, itself a very real and primal type of knowledge, often cosmic in its power, especially when expressed and evoked by great works of art. And Collingwood made the original intention of the artist so utterly primary, that the inward, psychological vision of the artist was itself said to be the actual art, whether or not that vision ever got translated into public forms.
This view of art as the expression of an original intention or feeling or vision in the artist gave rise to what is still perhaps the most widespread school of the interpretation of art. Modern "hermeneutics"—the art and science of interpretation—began with certain Romantically-inspired philosophical trends, notably in Friedrich Schleiermacher and then Wilhelm Dilthey, and continuing down to this day in such influential theorists as Emilio Betti and E.D. Hirsch. This approach, one of the oldest and in some ways the most central school of hermeneutics, maintains that the key to the correct interpretation of a text—considering "text" in the very broadest sense, as any symbol requiring interpretation, whether artistic, linguistic, poetic—the key to correct interpretation is the recovery of the maker's original intention, a psychological reconstruction of the author's (or artist's) intentions in the original historical setting.
In short, for these approaches, since the meaning of art is the maker's original intention, a valid interpretation involves the psychological reconstruction and recovery of this original intention. The hermeneutic gap between the artist and viewer is closed to the extent there is a "seeing eye to eye" with the artist's original meaning, and this occurs through the procedures of valid interpretation based on original recovery and reconstruction.
It is no accident that the theory of art as expression was historically paralleled by the broad trends of expressionism in the practice of art itself. The nineteenth-century expressionists and Post Impressionists, including Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, and Edvard Munch, directly opposed the Realist and Impressionist imitation of nature (Van Gogh: "Instead of trying to reproduce exactly what I have before my eyes, I use color more arbitrarily so as to express myself more forcibly"); from there to the Cubists and Fauves (Matisse: "What I am after above all is expression"); to Kandinsky and Klee and the abstract expressionism of Pollock, Kline, and de Kooning. In its various manifestations, expressionism was not just a stylistic or idealizing alteration of external representation, but an almost complete and total break with the tradition of imitation.
No sooner was this theory (and practice) of art as expression put forth, than another offshoot of the broad Romantic movement—psychoanalysis—pointed out that many human intentions are in fact unconscious. And further, these intentions, even though unconscious, nonetheless can make their way in disguised forms into everyday life, perhaps as neurotic symptoms, or as symbolic dreams, or as slips of the tongue, or, in general, as compromise formations expressing the conflict between a forbidden desire and a censoring or repressing force. The psychoanalyst, trained to spot the symbolic expression of these hidden desires, could thus interpret these symbols and symptoms to the individual, who in turn would thus gain, it was duly hoped, some sort of understanding and amelioration of his or her distressing condition.
In the sphere of art and literature, this inevitably meant that the original maker (artist, writer, poet) would, like everybody else, have various unconscious intentions, and these intentions, in disguised forms, would leave traces in the artwork itself. It followed then with mathematical precision: 1) if the meaning of art is the original intention expressed in the work; and 2) if the correct interpretation of art is therefore the reconstruction of this intention; but 3) if some intentions are unconscious and leave only symbolic traces in the artwork, then 4) an important part of the correct interpretation of an artwork is the unearthing and interpreting of these unconscious drives, intentions, desires, wishes. The art critic, to be a true critic, must also be a psychoanalyst.
Art Is in the Hidden Intent: Symptomatic Theories
This soon opened a Pandora's box of "unconscious intentions." If the artwork expressed the unconscious Freudian desires of the artist, why limit it to Freudian themes? There are, after all, several different types of unconscious structures in the human being, the list of which soon exploded. The artist exists in a setting of techno-economic structures, the Marxists pointed out, and a particular artwork will inexorably reflect the "base" of economic realities, and thus the correct interpretation of a text or work of art involves highlighting the class structures in which the art is produced. Feminists soon caught the fever, and aggressively tried to suggest that the fundamental and hidden structures were primarily those of gender, so that even Marxists were driven by the unconscious or thinly disguised intentions of patriarchal power. Womanists (feminists of color) very rapidly outflanked the mainstream feminists with a criticism whose opening line was, in effect, "We can't blame everything on the patriarchy, white girl...." And so the list would go: racism, sexism, elitism, speciesism, anthropocentrism, androcentrism, imperialism, ecologism, logocentrism, phallocentrism.
All of those theories might best be called Symptomatic Theories: they view a particular artwork as symptomatic of larger currents, currents the artist is often unaware of—sexual, economic, cultural, ideological. They generally grant that the meaning of art is the expression of an original feeling, intention, or vision of the artist. But they immediately add that the artist might have, or exist in, structures of unconscious intention, and these unconscious structures, generally not available to the awareness of the artists themselves, would nonetheless leave symbolic traces in their works of art, and these traces could be spotted, decoded, deciphered, and interpreted by the knowing critic. A valid interpretation is thus one that decodes and exposes the hidden intentions, whether individual or cultural.
Art Is in the Artwork
While there may be much truth to each of those positions—and we will shortly return for an assessment—nonetheless, few critics would concede that intentions alone, conscious or unconscious, define the nature and value of art.
In part as a reaction to these originally Romantic and expressivist versions of art, there arose various more "formal" interpretations of art and literature; and this, as I suggested, was in large measure a legacy of the more rational side of the Enlightenment agenda.
This Enlightenment rationalism had several profound influences on art theory and practice. The general atmosphere of Enlightenment scientific realism soon translated almost directly to the realist trends in literature and painting (Zola, Balzac, Flaubert, Courbet), and from there to the Impressionists, who repudiated so much of the Romantic-expressionist trends and sought instead to capture "immediate visual impressions" rendered intensely and impersonally, the emotions of the artist being quite secondary at best (Monet, Renoir, Manet, Pissarro, Degas), as well as the objective rendering of contemporary and actual experience, sometimes verging on the documentary, and always in sympathy with a realist attitude.
But Enlightenment rationalism also entered art theory and practice in a rather strict and dry sense, namely, in the view that the nature and value of art is to be found in the form of the artwork itself. Much of this formalism had its modern origin in Kant's immensely influential Critique of Judgment, but it would soon be powerfully expressed in music theory by Eduard Hanslick and in the visual arts by Roger Fry and Clive Bell. Formalism would likewise find its way into literary theory, most significantly with the Russian formalists (Jakobson, Propp); the American New Critics (Wimsatt and Beardsley); the French structuralists (Levi-Strauss, Barthes), neo-structuralists (early Foucault), and post-structuralists (Derrida, Paul de Man, Hartman, Lyotard).
For formalism in general, the meaning of a text or an artwork is found in the formal relationships between elements of the work itself. A valid interpretation of the work, therefore, involves the elucidation of these formal structures. In many cases, this was (and is) coupled with an aggressive denial of the importance or significance of the maker's original intention. Indeed, the artist or the author or the subject was pronounced "dead"—totally irrelevant to the work—as in Barthes's famous "death of the author" ("amputate the art from the artist"). Language itself replaced the author as the producer of the text, and structural analysis (in its original, neo-, or post- forms) became the only sure method of artistic interpretation. The "death of the subject" meant as well the death of the subject's original intention as a source of valid interpretation, and "What comes after the subject?" became the new rallying call.
In the rather influential American New Criticism, this view was expressed most forcefully by Monroe Beardsley and William Wimsatt, Jr. In their now famous essay, "The Intentional Fallacy," they conclude bluntly that the maker's intention is "neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work" of art. It was to the artwork itself that the interpreter and critic must essentially look. After all, they maintained, how can you know the intent of the artwork if it is not expressed in the art itself? Where else could you possibly look? Intentions that don't make it into the artwork might be interesting, but they are not, by definition, part of the artwork. And thus interpretation should center first and foremost on elements intrinsic to the artwork considered as a whole in itself.
Similar formalist theories of art were put forth in music by Hanslick (The Beautiful in Music), who maintained that the meaning of music was in its internal forms (melody, rhythm, harmony); and in the visual arts by Roger Fry (Vision and Design) and Clive Bell (Art), who both maintained that the nature and meaning of art was to be found in its "significant form" (Cezanne, for both of them, being the great exemplar).
In all of these versions of formalism, the locus and meaning of art is not in the intention of the artist, nor does it lie in what the artwork might represent, nor what it might express. Rather, the nature and meaning of art lies in the formal or structural relationship of the elements manifested in the artwork itself. And thus valid interpretation consists primarily in the elucidating of these forms and structures.
Art Is in the Viewer
As the modern world of the Enlightenment and its Romantic rebellion gave way to the postmodern world, yet another extremely influential trend in art and literary criticism emerged. Just as formalist theories killed the artist and centered solely on the artwork, this new trend further killed the artwork itself and centered solely on... the viewer of the art.
For these various theories of "reception and response," the meaning of art is not found in the author's original intention, nor is it found in any specific features of the artwork itself. Rather, these theories maintain, since the only way we actually get to know a work of art is by viewing it (looking, listening, reading), then the primary locus of the meaning of the artwork can only be found in the responses of the viewers themselves.
Thus, according to this view, the nature and meaning of art is to be found in the history of the reception and response to the artwork; and likewise, a valid interpretation of the artwork consists in an analysis of these responses (or the cumulative history of these responses). As Passmore summarizes it, "The proper point of reference in discussing works of art is an interpretation it sets going in an audience; that interpretation—or the class of such interpretations—is the work of art, whatever the artist had in mind in creating it. Indeed, the interpreter, not the artist, creates the work."
These theories trace much of their lineage to the work of Martin Heidegger, whose hermeneutic philosophy broke with the traditional conception of truth as an unchanging and objective set of facts, and replaced it with the notion of the historicity of truth: human beings do not have an unchanging nature so much as a changing history, and thus what we call "truth" is, in important ways, historically situated. Moreover, we come to understand the historicity of truth not so much through scientific empiricism but rather through interpretation (through "hermeneutics"), just as, if you and I want to understand each other, we must interpret what we are saying to each other ("What do you mean by that? Oh, I see"). Interpretation lies at the very heart of the historicity of truth.
Heidegger's hermeneutic philosophy has had an immense influence on art and literary theory, principally through two major students of his work: Hans-Georg Gadamer and Jacques Derrida. We briefly mentioned Derrida in connection with structuralist and post-structuralist theories, which locate the meaning of a text in chains of formal signifiers (and according to "post-structuralism," the chains of signifiers are endlessly "sliding"). Gadamer's influence has been equally widespread; he is now arguably the foremost theoretician of aesthetics.
For Gadamer, even a "purely" aesthetic event, such as looking at an abstract painting, is not merely a simple sensory occasion. The moment we start to ask what the painting means, or how it affects us, or what it might be saying—the moment the mute stare gives way to meaning—then we are inexorably stepping out of the "merely sensory" and into language and history. We are stepping into the linguistic world, which itself can only be understood by interpretation: What does that mean? And all meaning exists in history; that is, all meaning is marked by historicity. What a painting means to us, today, will be different from what that painting means to, say, people a thousand years from now (if it means anything at all). In other words, for these theorists, we cannot isolate meaning from the ongoing sweep of history.
The work of art, accordingly, exists in this historical stream, which brings forth new receptions, elicits new responses, gives new interpretations, unfolds new meanings as it flows. And, according to this view, the artwork is, so to speak, the sum total of its particular historical stream. The artwork is not something that exists by itself, outside of history, isolated and self-regarding, existing only because it looks at itself; rather, the only way we know the artwork is by viewing and interpreting it, and it is those interpretations, grounded in history, that constitute the overall art.
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