List of Speakers with provisional titles and abstracts. Times and locations to be available shortly.

Diarmuid Costello

The Problem of the Detail: Roger Scruton and Michael Fried on Intention in Photography

Roger Scruton claims that photography cannot be art because its mechanism restricts the photographer’s ability to control detail throughout the image. One can never be sure what to attend to in a photograph since much of it only appears because it was in shot alongside the subject. Should we take it as contributing to the image’s intended meaning or not? As it stands this is ambiguous: is the worry that photographs cannot convey the photographer’s intentions, or that they cannot convey her meaning, or both? Michael Fried effectively concedes the former, while missing the latter. Fried celebrates Thomas Demand’s photographs of elaborately constructed cardboard scenes that look real when photographed from a specific angle, as models of “sheer intendedness”. Now everything that is in the photograph is there because the photographer meant it to be. Though Fried thinks Demand succeeds where Scruton thinks photography necessarily fails, the underlying logic is the same: it is only because photography suffers from the problem Scruton identifies that we need Demand’s demonstration. What the philosopher and the art historian share is a set of mistaken but common assumptions about photography as a mind-independent, automatic imaging process. A richer conception of photographic imaging tells us where to look for both photographic agency and meaning.

Jason Gaiger

Pictorial Experience and the Perception of Rhythm

While paintings and other examples of graphic art such as drawings and engravings are frequently described as rhythmic, or as possessing rhythmic features, it is far from clear how such observations are to be understood. The central problem here is that rhythm is standardly recognised to be an inherently temporal phenomenon: rhythmic structure or organisation unfolds in time. If rhythm is essentially durational, how can a static configuration of marks and lines be rhythmic? To answer this question, we need to consider not only the ordering of the marks but the kinds of experience this can stimulate in the viewer. With reference to examples of both representational and abstract art, I argue that pictorial experience takes place in time, and thus is successive, but that it cannot be temporally structured in a sufficiently determinate manner to sustain the attentional focus required for the communication of even simple rhythmic patterns.

Robert Hopkins

Pictures and Non-Confrmity

Do pictures of various kinds invite the same affective responses as the scenes they depict? Some do not. To see why, we must examine seeing-in, the experience in which we grasp depicted content. In such experience, we are visually presented with the depicted scene. That visual presentation is sui generis: it cannot be identified with any other way of being visually presented with things, such as seeing or visualizing. For the visual presentation of scene is partly constituted by our awareness of properties of the marks. While these claims apply to the visual presentation of scene itself, they open up a possibility: that other properties of the marks partly constitute the ‘stance’ towards that scene the picture embodies — the way we are invited to see it, the attitude towards it expressed, and/or the affective responses to the scene the picture invites. I argue that this possibility is one some pictures realise.

Dominic McIver Lopes

The Spectator’s Brief

Traditional thinking about aesthetic value represents the aesthetic value of an item as giving a spectator reason to have a finally valuable experience of the item. Since the experience is at one and the same time a judgement and an action, traditional thinking also reduces aesthetic action to spectatorship. However, I claim that there are many aesthetic actions and that aesthetic values are better understood as providing agents reasons to perform any of these actions. Hence the aesthetic agent is not a mere spectator. In this talk, I show how my claims deliver a richer, and more accurate, conception of aesthetic spectatorship than does traditional thinking.

Bence Nanay

Global Aesthetics

The period in the visual arts between (roughly) 1860 and (roughly) 1960 is known as modernism. One grand question in the philosophy of art history (or philosophical art history) is what makes modernism in the visual arts different from other periods and movements. The aim of this paper is not to give necessary and sufficient conditions for modernist visual arts – I don’t think this is a feasible task. Rather, I want to capture a crucial aspect of modernist visual arts – its relation to pictorial organization. I will argue that modernism in painting, photography and film has a unique attitude towards pictorial organization that is importantly different from all other periods and artistic movements: it thematizes the conflict between two-dimensional and three-dimensional pictorial organization. But I am explicitly not saying that this distinctive feature can capture everything that is interesting about modernism. I don’t think we can find anything that is both non-trivial and is still in common in all human endeavors labelled as modernist. But if we narrow down the question in two ways (to two-dimensional visual art and to one aspect thereof, namely, pictorial organization), we may be able to make some progress.

Belinda Piercy

Attending to the Immediate: Dewey and Isenberg on Aesthetic Attention

Both Dewey (1934) and Isenberg (1944) claim there is something important about the immediacy of aesthetic attention. It isn’t that our aesthetic response must take place immediately, but that our attention should be focused upon what is directly present to us in the object and the experience we are presently having of it. Nanay (2015) has recently revived interest in the topic of aesthetic attention by arguing that a key feature of paradigmatic cases of aesthetic experience is the kind of attention we exercise. However, I will argue that identifying paradigmatic features of aesthetic attention cannot help us to clarify the nature of aesthetic experience so long as this effort is unmoored from a deeper account of the purpose that directs our attention upon the immediate features of our experience, a purpose that contrasts with other kinds of cognitive and practical aims.

Sonia Sedivy

Aesthetic Properties, Perception and Historical Understanding

The paper argues that aesthetic properties are critical for appreciating the mutual explanatory relationships between theories of art and of perception. I highlight how Arthur Danto and Kendall L Walton’s philosophical work draws on art history to show that perception of artworks and their properties, including aesthetic properties, is informed by historical understanding. For example, one needs some individuative understanding that allows one to see an artwork rather than a pile of Brillo boxes, and the need for such understanding carries over to the artwork’s properties, including its aesthetic properties. This in turn shows relationships between theories of art and perception:
(1) Theories of perception must be able to explain the role of historical understanding in immediate perception.
(2) Theories of art provide data showing how art works and their properties are historical in nature, and place requirements on theory of perception to explain how historical understanding enters into perception.

Paul G. Smith

‘The most beautiful blue’: art, science, and the phenomenology of coloured shadows

Since the Renaissance, these ephemeral phenomena have aroused considerable curiosity. But theories about coloured shadows often led scientists and artists to misperceive their causes, and to neglect their phenomenology. Some artists were nevertheless able to devise ways of looking – facilitated by devices, or by the act of painting itself – which elicited a less distorted way of seeing them. This paper will examine these modes of perception, and how they allowed artists to capture the aesthetic significance of coloured shadows — which is more considerable than might be supposed.

Kendall L Walton

Abstraction in Music and the Visual Arts

I will examine several notions of abstraction applicable to the arts. Focussing on one of them—abstraction as generality—will reveal surprising similarities between music and the visual arts, and the auditory and visual experiences of appreciators. Ordinary stick figure drawings will help us understand supposedly “absolute” music, which will in turn serve as a model for some kinds of “abstract” visual art.