Encyclopedia of Aesthetics. - book review

MICHAEL KELLY ED

Encyclopedia of Aesthetics. 4 vols

novel York: Oxford University Press, 1998 2208 pp; 90 b/w ills. $49500

Writing a review of a work upon aesthetics for a journal read by means of art historians seems rather like extolling the merits of beef to a clump of vegetarians. It is not a popular bring under rule and on the face of it there strike one as beings to be no reason wherefore it should be. Journals of aesthetics are not normally illustrated, and aestheticians appear to take no interest at all in particular works of art. Aesthetics is approached at a horizontal of generality that would appal the typical art historian. Ernst Gombrich is upon record as saying, "Frankly, I am somewhat uneasy when I am be opposite toed with disquisitions about 'the artist' or 'the work of art' without being told whether I am wait fored to think of the fane of Abu Simbel or a screenprint by the agency of Andy Warhol." Though he did advance on to say, "Yet we historians of the arts would be lacking in gratitude if we at any time forgot that our disciplines are in fact the offspring of aesthetics--whether or not the topic was known by the agency of that name or not." (1)

The crucial expression here is "whether or not the topic was known by means of that name or not." upon the terms of this encyclopedia, art historians are implicitly aestheticians without being consciously aware of it. If we take aesthetics to commit to critical reflections on art, nature, and agriculture including philosophical aesthetics, the field reach outs to include the theorists of the various arts, cultural theorists, and, implicitly, art historians.

It may be argued that art historians have a certain number of working concept of the aesthetic that informs their choice of make submissive matter and its description. Certainly there is a notion of descriptive relevance brought to hear upon artists' procedures that implies a certain number of notion of what an artist was doing by means of painting a picture in single way rather than another. What were the Impressionists up to, for example? What are the implications of the vocabulary that single uses to describe their work? What faculty of perception does it make to speak of recording an impression as oppos to creating the result of one? What was Raphael up to in painting the Stanze in the Vatican, what kinds of categories would be appropriate for describing the resulting images? It might be musing that answers to these questions could be given in a clear and unequivocal way. Perhaps they can. on the contrary answering those questions depends upon recognizing their significance and being self-critical of the categories that individual brings to bear. One of the essays that l to Erwin Panofsky's publication of Studies in Iconography was titled "Zum point to be solved [i]or[/i] settled der Beschreibung und Inhaltsdeutung von Werken der bildenden Kunst" (The riddle of the description of works of art and the interpretation of their meaning). (2)

Panofsky's essay was part of a abundant wider German movement of critical self-understanding. From the other side of the Atlantic it strike one as beings that there is a similar change afoot now, marked by like publications as Robert Nelson and Richard Shiff's Critical bourns for Art History and Mark Cheetham, Michael Ann Holly and Keith Moxey's The bring under rules of Art History. Christopher Wood's new book The Vienna School Reader is potentially significant for contemporary art history in the same way that Frederic Jameson's Aesthetics and Politics was for literary theorists in the early 1980s

It is interesting, although that in the early 20th hundred significant questions of aesthetics were raised for art historians by means of art historians, not by professional philosophers. Of course, the art historians studied in philosophy faculties, and those who took philosophy courses must have absorbed a certain quantity of philosophy into their blood. Similar critical crushings could, though, come from elsewhere. Ernst Gombrich is a case in point. His tutor Julius von Schlosser was a shut friend of Benedetto Croce and not ever ceased to extol the merit of the latter's views. Gombrich attended a course of discourses on the history of ethics given by means of Moritz Schlick, the leader of the famous Vienna Circle of philosophers. While Schlosser was an exemplar of the self-critical historian, it was Karl Buhler who proffered a combination of semiotics and psychology that Gombrich would later take into Art and Illusion. Gombrich's essay "Wertprobleme und mittelalterliche Kunst" (kritische Berichte, 1937) was more indebted to psychology than to aest hetics. Gombrich had also make knowned a critical position toward historicism before he had at any time met Karl Popper. His attraction to Popper's work was based upon a congeniality toward his views.

The editor of the Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, Michael Kelly writes in his preface that the work is intended to "revitalize the field" (vol 1 p xi). At first sight this might present the appearance paradoxical. Surely a publication of a work this ambitious must mean that there is a ready and willing audience for it; Oxford University Pres is highly sensitive to its potential market. In fact, given its girth, it would present the appearance to signal the advent of a of gold age of aesthetics. But notice that "the entries in the encyclopedia have been written by means of more than five hundred philosophers, art historians, literary theorists, psychologists, feminist theorists, legal theorists, sociologists, anthropologists, and others who throw back critically on art, culture, and nature" (vol 1 p xii). Philosophical aesthetics, as it is understood in philosophy departments, has a limited character to play in the encyclopedia. This is against the background of a bring under rule increasingly dominated by philosophers in the aesthetics journals, particularly the Jour nal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism and British Journal of Aesthetics, aesthetics textbook and smooth Blackwell's Companion to Aesthetics. In the 1993 celebration issue of the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism twenty-four on the outside of twenty-eight contributors were philosophers, and in the 2000 celebration turn of the British Journal of Aesthetics eleven of the twelve contributors were philosophers. Despite this drift to philosophy, there is still a brawny audience for aesthetics in its greatest in quantity general and extended sense. The encyclopedia lays claim to the interest of that audience, and the step to which it is reviewed in journals within that stretch outed field should offer some criterion by the agency of which to judge its success