Annotated Bibliography: “Artworld Data and Aesthetic Theory” by Robert Kraut

Robert Kraut, “Artworld Data and Aesthetic Theory,” Artworld Metaphysics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 1-24.

This is the first chapter of a book by Robert Krauss, who teaches at Ohio State University.  This is the first of many entries on book chapters and journal articles by OSU faculty, in preparation of working with these scholars for the next several years.  This chapter makes two arguments against prevalent ways of philosophizing about art.   First, Kraut criticizes the conflation of the philosophy of art with art criticism.  The latter’s task is to categorize various activities in the art world as good or bad, as beautiful or ugly, as well or poorly done.  Just as it is the philosopher of physics to do physics, so the philosopher of art is not called upon to legitimize or conduct business within the artworld.  Art criticism exists within the artworld; the philospher of art ought to remain outside of artworld discourse in order to philosophize about that discourse.  It becomes clear that Kraut regards philosophy of art (and, presumably, many other philosophical disciplines) as descriptive project, that is 

…in the business of description, codification, and articulation of artworld practices.  There is no presupposition…that the theories identify fundamental metaphysical facts that confer legitimacy upon those practices. (8) 

Kraut’s second criticism is of aesthetic theory that “tends to ignore relevant data” (23), in particular the tendency to disregard the testimonies of artists and consumers of art in discerning what is possible or characteristic of aesthetic production and experience.  For instance atomistic accounts of aesthetic sense, like that of Rohort, are in tension with the way that actual musicians describe the phenomena of making music.  Theorists that deny that music is, in some sense, linguistic, as Malcolm Budd argues, also ignore (or reject) musicians who regarding musical comprehension as analogous to linguistic comprehension.  This concern, of course, allies itself with the first.  It is because theorists confuse their task with that of the critic, and fail to appreciate that their job is to codify the norms operative in artworld practice, that they would ever feel entitled to “dismiss” such testimony, to “ignore key psychological realities of artistic practice”, and to “ride roughshod over the data” of artworld discourse. Kraut is setting up a project in philosophy of art by, first pointing to methodological inadequacies of some of his contemporary aestheticians.   Not wanting to judge Kraut too quickly, I am suspicious that for all of the analogies between philosophy of art and, say, philosophy of physics, it is not obvious that theorists of art who understand their role as legitimizing artworld practices by arguing for an understanding of what makes art good, and doing so by criticizing or praising various artworld artifacts, are misunderstanding the discipline.  In particular, philosophers of physics are not interested in doing physics, but neither are philosophers of art interested in composing symphonies.  Many philosophers of science, however, ARE interested in developing theories of demarcation, theories of what does and does not constituted actual science, separating astrology from astronomy.  It may be that the standard of success of a theory of demarcation is that it tracks which scientific practices are actually accepted by a field; perhaps the data to be explained by a theory of demarcation is certain scientific practices being accepted as sufficiently rigorous by the scienceworld.  But this is not the only way to adjudicate a theory of demarcation, nor is it obviously the best way.  Perhaps a good theory of demarcation actually will end up denouncing some portion of currently acceptable scientific practice as not acceptably scientific, as too analogous to astrology and not sufficiently analogous to astronomy.  All of this is to say that, perhaps, philosophers of art that take their task as the determination of good art, in a manner that involves declaring some subset of the practices that make up the artworld as not good enough, are not so much guilty of attempting to participate in the art world (as would be the philosopher of physics that tries to do physics), but are rather taking their task to be the development of a successful theory of what makes artworks good, and allowing such a theory to denounce a certain set of practices that exist within the artworld, just as the theoritician of scientific demarcation may end up having to say that some scientific practices aren’t good enough.

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