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Jiri Benovsky
The Limits of Art
On Borderline
Cases of Artworks
and their Aesthetic
Properties
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Jiri Benovsky
The Limits of Art
On Borderline Cases of Artworks and their
Aesthetic Properties
123
Jiri Benovsky
University of Fribourg
Fribourg, Switzerland
ISSN 2211-4548 ISSN 2211-4556 (electronic)
SpringerBriefs in Philosophy
ISBN 978-3-030-54794-3 ISBN 978-3-030-54795-0 (eBook)
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Acknowledgements
This book and the ideas and arguments it contains evolved from an ongoing interest
in the notion of art, and some ideas present in this book already appeared in some of
my journal articles, especially “Against aesthetic-sensory dependence”(2016, The
Nordic Journal of Aesthetics, 51) and “The limits of photography”(2014,
International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 22:5). For discussions and helpful
feedback, I would like to thank Laure Blanc-Benon, Laurent Cesalli, Céline
Chevalley, Diarmuid Costello, Fabian Dorsch, Rob Hopkins, Thomas Jacobi,
Baptiste Le Bihan, Robin Le Poidevin, Jerrold Levinson, Dominic McIver Lopes,
Thi Nguyen, Laurie Paul, Mikael Pettersson, Frédéric Pouillaude, Roger Pouivet,
Markus Schrenk, Ted Sider, Pietro Snider, Joel Snyder, Gianfranco Soldati, Cain
Todd, and Dawn Wilson.
Published with support of the Swiss National Science Foundation.
v
Contents
1 Introduction: Different Types of Limits ...................... 1
References ............................................. 4
2 Extending the Limits I: Non-visual and Non-auditory
Artworks .............................................. 5
2.1 Introduction ........................................ 5
2.2 Gustatory and Olfactory Artworks ........................ 7
2.3 Proprioceptive Artworks ............................... 10
2.4 Training, Skill, and Evaluation .......................... 18
2.5 ‘Private Versus Public’—Some Remarks ................... 21
References ............................................. 24
3 Extending the Limits II: Intellectual Artworks ................. 27
3.1 Aesthetic Properties, Sensory Dependence,
and the Case of Theories .............................. 27
3.2 The Beauty of Theories ............................... 30
3.3 Theories as Artworks ................................. 35
References ............................................. 39
4 Limits and Their Vagueness: The Case of Paintings
and Photographs ........................................ 41
4.1 On Photographs and Other Images ....................... 41
4.2 Digital Manipulation .................................. 45
4.3 Vague Limits ....................................... 48
4.4 The Process of Production and Necessary
Decisions .......................................... 52
4.5 Photographs, Paintings, Vagueness ....................... 55
References ............................................. 57
vii
About the Author
Jiri Benovsky having been struck by Descartes’evil demon thought-experiment, he
began to study metaphysics to try to find a proof that the world really exists. He did
not find that proof, but at least he found an academic way to live where he can not
only go climbing and skiing in the mountains but also spend his days thinking about
existence, reality, time, art, as well as the aesthetics of gastronomic meals, rock
climbing, or photography. He is the author of several books, including recently:
Eliminativism, objects, and persons. The virtues of non-existence (Routledge, 2018),
Mind and matter. Panpsychism, dual-aspect monism, and the combination problem
(2018, Springer), and Meta-metaphysics (2016, Springer). More information on
Benovsky’s work can be found online at www.jiribenovsky.org.
ix
Chapter 1
Introduction: Different Types of Limits
§1. This book is about exploring interesting borderline cases of art. I’ll discuss the
cases of gustatory and olfactory artworks (focusing on food), proprioceptive artworks
(dance, martial arts, and rock climbing qua proprioceptive experiences), intellectual
artworks (philosophical and scientific theories), as well as the vague limits between
painting and photography. Perhaps you’ll find it obvious that some or all of these
cases are genuine cases of art, and that the claims I will be making are trivial. In
that case, I’ll be happy to agree and I hope that this book will still be of interest
as a fruitful discussion of these cases of artworks and their limits. Perhaps you’ll
find it obvious that some or all of these cases are not genuine cases of art—indeed,
all of them, individually, have been denied the status of artworks at some point. In
that case, I’ll be happy to disagree and I’ll try to offer reasons to change your mind.
My aim in this short book is thus twofold. First, I hope that the discussion of this
series of particular claims about these particular cases will be of interest for its own,
first-level, sake; and second, from this discussion, a more general picture about the
nature of art and about what counts as an artwork will arise. Indeed, the different
cases will allow us to consider different types of limits. Some limits will concern our
senses (our different perceptual modalities), some will concern vagueness and fuzzy
boundaries between different types of works of art, some will concern the amount
of human intention and intervention in the process of creation of an artwork, and
some will concern the border between art and science. In these various ways, by
understanding better such borderline cases, we will—or so I hope—get a better grip
on an understanding of the nature of art.
§2. “What is art?” is a very general and cruelly difficult question. Perhaps, it
is so cruelly difficult precisely because it is so very general. Indeed, any precise
answer, that is, any definition of art, or artwork, which would precisely define what
counts as art and what does not, is always in principle at great risk of leaving some
possibilities out and of being open to possible counter-examples. The notion of art,
or artwork, is a vague one but this is not only a problem of vagueness. The difficulty
of providing a definition also stems from the fact that art evolves with time, that it
is culture-relative, and that we need to adapt our understanding of what art is to this
© The Author(s) 2021
J. Benovsky, The Limits of Art, SpringerBriefs in Philosophy,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54795- 0_1
1
2 1 Introduction: Different Types of Limits
ever-evolving process. A strict definition of what counts as art and what does not
is bound to fail at some point. But not having a definition of something does not
mean that this something is inexplicable (contra Adajian (2018, §1)). Indeed, if we
keep in mind the ever-evolving nature of art, we can simply realize that there is no
need for a definition (why would it be necessary to have one?) and that we simply
should continuously update our understanding of what art is, and allow ourselves
to be surprised from time to time when new, challenging forms of art emerge. Any
definition that would try, for instance, to identify what is common to all artworks
would simply be inadequate, perhaps precisely in the sense—highly relevant to the
overall purposes of this book—that it would beg the question against non-standard
types of artworks and classify them as not being art. In order to resist such a possibly
question-begging stance, we can simply resist the need for a definition.1Walton
(2007, p. 148) even suggested that the question does not even make much sense: “It
is not at all clear that these words—‘What is art?’—express anything like a single
question, to which competing answers are given […] The sheer variety of proposed
definitions should give us pause. One cannot help wondering whether there is any
sense in which they are attempts to […] address the same issue”. This does not mean,
however, that we should somehow become sceptical about the very notion of art and
that we should abandon the very idea of trying to understand what an artwork is. On
the contrary, the lack of a precise and fixed definition is all the more reason to try to
improve our understanding of the nature of art, while embracing its impermanence
and vagueness.
§3. To this end, let me list some points I propose to take on board as working
criteria for a discussion about what counts as an artwork and what does not. Keeping
in mind what I said above, these do not constitute a set of necessary and sufficient
conditions. Rather, they are merely indicators or pointers that help us clarify the
discussion about the nature of art. I take it that this list is rather standard (although
it is, of course, controversial),2and I am simply going to use these points as more
or less optional guidelines, by examining whether they apply to the various cases I
am going to discuss below and whether they are useful or not. As a general rule, I’ll
work with the idea that if something does not satisfy all of these points, this is not
automatically a reason to think that it is not an artwork.
(1) Artworks possess aesthetic properties
(2) Artworks are subject to aesthetic judgements
(3) Artworks have the capacity to trigger aesthetic experiences
(4) Artworks have the capacity to trigger emotions
(5) Artworks have the capacity to convey meanings and ideas
(6) Artworks are challenging (both for the artist and the observer)
(7) Artworks require skill to be produced
1Adajian (2018) offers an extensive discussion of definitions of art. Discussion concerning the
project of defining art can be found, inter alia, in Kennick (1958), Stecker (1996,2005), Weitz
(1950), Ziff (1953).
2Schrenk (2014) uses a similar list. Compare to Gaut’s (2000,2005) discussion of art as a cluster
concept.
1 Introduction: Different Types of Limits 3
(8) Artworks qua objects can have relevant non-aesthetic features and a non-
aesthetic function.
(1), (2), (3), and (4) lie at the heart of what I want to take on board as a rough
idea of what art is. (Perhaps, (3) and (4) are about the same thing.) In the following
chapters, I am going to put these criteria to work, and see what can be learned by
applying them to quite non-standard cases.
§4. In addition to these criteria, there are some notions that emerge as being
characterizations of works of art that we often appeal to when we talk about art. Let
me quickly mention them, since they will also prove to be useful in the discussion of
the non-standard cases I am going to focus on in the chapters to come. Harmony (and
related notions such as symmetry) is perhaps the most often cited. In Western culture
at least, the idea of something that is a coherently integrated whole, where proportion,
symmetry, and harmony play an important role, is often central to the way we evaluate
it as being a (good) piece of art. While Aristotle insisted especially on symmetry,
Plato insisted on unity, and the way we evaluate artworks today has inherited and
developed both of these criteria, at least when it comes to classical and standard
worksofart.Thenotionofbalance is also often put forward, relatedly to harmony,
unity, symmetry, and similar notions. These notions are of course implemented in
different ways in different kinds of artworks such as music, sculpture, painting, or
architecture, but they seem to provide a relatively common ground to such different
types of cases.
The notions of complexity and simplicity also often play an important role. While
being contradictory, they can both be seen as positive features of an artwork and
characterize its aesthetic value. A complex work can be intriguing, intricate, and
sophisticated; it can be baroquely appealing, and its overall balance will often be
emphasized. Simplicity will often be taken to be elegant in a straightforward way—
indeed, simplicity and elegance just seem to go together.
Intensity is another feature of works of art that often plays a crucial role in their
appreciation and evaluation. It can manifest itself in different forms, but perhaps
what it relates to on a general level is the traditional idea insisted upon by Burke
that beauty causes passion in the observer. This lies at the heart of criteria (3) and
(4) above, offering a response-dependent understanding of what makes something
to be art. As Hume (1740, 299) puts it, beauty “[…] is fitted to give a pleasure and
satisfaction to the soul. Pleasure and pain, therefore, are not only necessary attendants
of beauty and deformity, but constitute their very essence.” He adds that “beauty is
no quality in things themselves: it exists merely in the mind which contemplates
them; and each mind perceives a different beauty” (Hume 1757, 136). This kind of
subjectivism is useful to be taken on board; it will, however, need to be weakened
and refined (as Hume himself did) in order to account for the fact that more or less
objective judgements of the aesthetic value of an artwork can be made—this will be
apparent in my discussion of the different types of cases, and I’ll come back to this
general issue in due course.
4 1 Introduction: Different Types of Limits
In addition to the criteria (1)–(8), let us then keep in mind: harmony, symmetry,
unity, balance, complexity, simplicity, intensity, passion, pleasure; and let us start
exploring some non-standard cases of art.
References
Adajian T (2018) The definition of art. Stanford Encycl Philos. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/
art-definition/
Gaut B (2000) ‘Art’ as a Cluster Concept. In: Carroll N (ed) Theories of art today. University of
Wisconsin Press, pp 25–44
Gaut B (2005) The cluster account of art defended. Brit J Aesthetics 45(3):273–288
Hume D (1740) A treatise of human nature. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1988
Hume D (1757) Of the standard of taste, essays moral and political. George Routledge and Sons,
London, 1894
Kennick WE (1958) Does traditional aesthetics rest on a mistake? Mind 67(267):317–334
Schrenk M (2014) Is proprioceptive art possible? In: Priest G, Young D (eds) Philosophy and the
martial arts. Routledge, New York, pp 101–116
Stecker R (1996) Artworks: meaning, definition, value. Pennsylvania State University Press
Stecker R (2005) Aesthetics and the philosophy of art: an introduction. Rowman & Littlefield
Publishers
Walton K (2007) Aesthetics—What?, Why?, and Wherefore? J Aesthetics Art Criticism 65(2):147–
162
Weitz M (1950) Philosophy of the Arts. Harvard University Press, Cambridge
Ziff P (1953) The task of defining a work of art. Philos Rev 62(1):58–78
Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing,
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the copyright holder.
Chapter 2
Extending the Limits I: Non-visual
and Non-auditory Artworks
Abstract We talk about culinary arts, as we also talk about martial arts. Does this
mean that a meal or a kata are to be understood as being artworks? In this chapter,
I take these and other cases seriously and I claim that they are indeed genuine cases
of art, in the same way as paintings, photographs, sculptures, or musical works. My
centre of interest concerns non-visual and non-auditory forms of art. Traditionally,
visual and auditory arts dominate the debate in aesthetics and philosophy of art, as
they dominate the art world in general—our senses of sight and hearing thus dominate
our very understanding of what an artwork is. As a consequence, artworks are mostly
understood as being public entities, widely shareable in the sense of being available
to different spectators/auditors. In this chapter, I explore other senses, which are
often neglected; I focus on gastronomic meals as cases of gustatory and olfactory
artworks, and on dance, karate, and climbing as cases of proprioceptive artworks.
The overall aim of this chapter is thus to extend the limits of what counts as art and
what does not. I offer a very inclusive view, and through the discussion of various
types of examples, I offer reasons to think that such a view is indeed adequate.
2.1 Introduction
§1. To start the discussion, let me indulge in a short biographical narrative and
recount an experience I recently had in the restaurant of the famous French chef
Marc Veyrat (in his restaurant La Maison des Bois in the mountains near Annecy).
One of the meals on the menu consists in a small, greenish, olive-shaped and -sized,
rather strangely looking ‘thing’ with an irregular surface, which does not look very
palatable at all. It is prepared by the chef himself in the middle of the restaurant,
for all guests at the same time, and it is ‘cooked’ in liquid nitrogen, piece by piece.
When the chef gives it to your hand, it’s very cold, it even burns a little, and it
emits strange fumes. Once each guest has been given their own piece, the chef then
asks everybody to close their eyes and to put the ‘thing’ in their mouths. Let me
try to convey the gustatory and olfactory experience which follows: various textures
succeed each other, the ‘thing’ being first solid, and then very suddenly liquid and
gas at the same time, where both the liquid and the gas ingredients continue to evolve
© The Author(s) 2021
J. Benovsky, The Limits of Art, SpringerBriefs in Philosophy,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54795- 0_2
5
6 2 Extending the Limits I: Non-visual and Non-auditory Artworks
and transform, providing various stages of the overall experience. Each stage brings
with itself a different taste and a different scent, ranging from wood, lichen, fir tree,
pine cone, forest herbs,… to simply fresh air. The succession of the different stages
provides an overall experience of smelling and tasting the forest itself—a gustatory
and olfactory walk in a forest. And indeed, that’s what the chef planned to provide as
an experience for the guests, reinforcing the experience by telling a story aloud and
by asking his guests to imagine, with their eyes always closed, that they are walking
through the forest which is just behind the restaurant and where all the ingredients
for this ‘meal’ have been collected. The succession of different tastes and odours is
so skilfully done and planned that the illusion is very strong indeed and the overall
experience simply staggering.
§2. We often talk about “culinary arts”, and I am going to defend the view that
this is a case where we can take the “arts” label seriously. I am also going to defend
the broader view that many meals and drinks, including but not being exhausted
by examples of gastronomic cuisine,giverisetoolfactory and gustatory artworks.
Perhaps this claim is not actually very controversial and perhaps some might even
find it to be rather trivial. But traditionally, visual arts like painting or sculpture, as
well as auditory (musical) arts, dominate the debate in aesthetics and philosophy
of art, and they of course dominate the art world in general, occupying galleries
and museums around the world. In this way, our senses of sight and hearing often
dominate our very understanding of what an artwork is. This is one of the reasons
why artworks are mostly understood as being public entities—shareable in the sense
of being available to different spectators/auditors. (There are of course also other
types of public artworks, like novels.) In this chapter, I am going to explore other
senses, which are often neglected. I’ll discuss the case of gustatory and olfactory
artworks and the case of proprioceptive artworks (I’ll focus on dance, karate, and
rock climbing). The overall aim of this chapter is to push the limits of what counts
as art and what does not. I’ll offer an inclusive view, and through the discussion of
various types of examples in this chapter I’ll offer reasons to think that such a view
is indeed adequate. (Chap. 3will then push the limits even further.) Many human
activities will thus, in my view, give rise to artworks (or simply be artworks)—
perhaps much more often than what is usually thought and accepted. To my mind,
this is a good thing. I’ll defend this general view and I am going to say why such a
view does not lead to a situation where just ‘anything counts’ and where the notion
of an artwork would become empty of any genuine meaning by being too broad and
too inclusive. In this chapter, I’ll focus on gustatory and olfactory artworks as well as
on proprioceptive artworks; extending the limits concerning our sensory perceptual
modalities. In the next chapter, I’ll then focus on intellectual artworks; extending the
limits to the domain of scientific and philosophical theories.
2.2 Gustatory and Olfactory Artworks 7
2.2 Gustatory and Olfactory Artworks
§1. To start the discussion about gustatory and olfactory art, two caveats are needed.
First, it is not clear that the two senses, namely taste and smell, are really two.
Indeed, it is perhaps more adequate to say that our perceptual system typically inte-
grates information from both of these sensory modalities into a common multi-modal
whole. Taste and smell often mingle together to produce an overall experience with
these two aspects, which can be distinguished to some extent, but where the resulting
whole is as important as their individual contributions.1I thus suggest to talk here,
for the sake of brevity, about gustatory experiences and about taste, but when I do
so, I intend to fully include olfaction in the story. The sense of touch should also be
included in this package, at least partly, since it allows us to feel the textures and
the hardness or softness of the objects that we taste, which is highly relevant when
it comes to the appreciation of their taste—typically, the way a taste is released and
distributed (slowly, suddenly,…) in the mouth depends on the texture (soft, melting,
hard, crunchy, …) of what one is tasting, the texture being also related to the (contin-
uously changing) temperature of the gustandum. Thus, many inter-related factors
(and at least three senses) are involved in what I will often refer to, for the sake of
brevity, as taste or as a gustatory experience.
Second, when it comes to meals, especially gastronomic meals, it is of course true
that they are not only objects of gustatory appreciation, but of visual appreciation
as well. Indeed, in a way that is perhaps not very controversial, gastronomic meals
qua visually appreciated objects on a table can be understood as being artworks, in
the same sense other visually accessible objects can be such (sculpture is perhaps
the closest standard case). This is especially important since we typically first see
what we eat before we eat it, which creates an amount of expectation from our part,
and before we even taste anything we quite naturally imagine what it is going to
taste like. This can have a strong influence on our gustatory appreciation, as many
experiences involving green-coloured meat, blue-coloured strawberries, etc. have
shown. Remember what the chef Marc Veyrat does when he presents his peculiar
‘meal’ to his guests: he asks everybody to close their eyes, and for a very good reason
since this piece of food is visually not appealing at all, and since the whole point
of the culinary experience is the gustatory aspect of it (again, including olfaction
and touch as well). The point is to focus on the gustatory experience (to this end, it
would perhaps be even better not to show the ‘thing’ to his guests at all.) This is of
course familiar from blindfolded wine-tasting, and it is also the whole point of some
popular restaurants where guests find themselves in a fully dark room and where
they are thus deprived of their sense of sight. A trained evaluator of food or wine can
often manage to free herself from any unwanted influences of the visual aspects of
the object of her evaluation (while they are, often, actually wanted and judged to be
relevant for the overall appreciation of a meal or a wine), and less-trained evaluators
can simply try to do so, in order to isolate the gustatory aspect of their experience.
1See Korsmeyer (1999, p. 79–84).
8 2 Extending the Limits I: Non-visual and Non-auditory Artworks
There are also other kinds of influences, wanted or not, that can have an impact
on a gustatory experience. To mention again the case of Marc Veyrat, he not only
asks his guests to close their eyes, but he also tells aloud, in the restaurant, a story
about a walk in the nearby forest, thus reinforcing the overall experience of “tasting
the forest”. Indeed, what he does is that he uses his uncanny meal as an imagination-
triggering tool where the object he submits for gustatory appreciation to his guests
prescribes imagining a specific narrative, which is then reinforced by the narrative
that he explicitly voices aloud (I’ll come back to this in section V below, where I’ll
make a comparison with Walton’s similar view about depiction).
§2. With all this in mind, can we say that there are gustatory artworks? Roger
Scruton (who focuses on wine2) denies that there are because “[…] smells cannot be
organized as sounds are organized: put them together and they mingle, losing their
character […] they remain free-floating and unrelated, unable to generate expectation,
tension, harmony, suspension or release” (Scruton 2009, p. 122). But, we have just
seen a striking counter-example to this, namely Marc Veyrat’s peculiar meal. In this
case, tastes (and smells and textures) are quite precisely orchestrated and provide an
organized succession of individual gustatory experiences which constitute a coherent
whole, which is not only surprising but also balanced, harmonious, unified, complex,
and which provides intense gustatory pleasure to the appreciator. This is a particularly
elaborated case. But even if in a perhaps less strong way, this applies perfectly well
to wine as well, and—perhaps even quite trivially—this is also true of many meals,
especially (but not only) gastronomic meals. The idea of balance and harmony on the
one hand, and surprise on the other hand, and the idea that a meal should be a complex
but unified whole which provides intensity and pleasure lies probably at the core of
concern of any chef who takes her cooking at heart.3We are here in a situation where
the various typical features of artworks I mentioned in Chap. 1(§3–4) are quite
clearly found. Such meals (or drinks), qua objects of taste, thus exhibit aesthetic
properties based on these various features, and they can be evaluated, appreciated
and judged to be of aesthetic value by any trained (or even less trained) evaluator. As
it is the case with Marc Veyrat’s guests, and as it is the case in many other situations
of food tasting, wine tasting, and similar, the gustatorily accessible whole made of
smells, textures, and tastes thus provides pleasure (or displeasure) which can be quite
intense and trigger an emotional response, thus triggering a typical state in which we
find ourselves when we appreciate the beauty of something. Thus, contra Scruton,
it appears that the criteria (1)–(4) from Chap. 1(§3) are in many cases of gustatory
experiences fully satisfied and that such gustatory objects of appreciation can in
this sense very well be understood as objects of aesthetic appreciation, where the
successful (sufficiently developed) cases constitute cases of being artworks.
2For a critical discussion and a fully-developed view about wine, see Todd (2010).
3“[...] many meals are intended by their cooks to be considered largely in this way—to be savoured,
appraised, thought about, discussed—any many eaters consider them in this way. Such meals also
serve the functions of relieving hunger and providing nourishment, but they are of a kind which
shows that this is not the main point of them.” (Telfer 2008, p. 16).
2.2 Gustatory and Olfactory Artworks 9
Criterion (5) (namely, the idea that artworks have the capacity to convey meanings
and ideas) is perhaps less present in the case of gustatory artworks than, say, in the
case of paintings, but it is present to some extent. As already mentioned, the whole
point of the gustatory experience provided by Marc Veyrat is a kind of a gustatory
walk in the forest, which conveys something like the concept of a Shinrin-yoku
(森林—a ‘forest bath’), which is all about the idea of connecting us to nature, to
the forest, and which allows us to reflect on our often too urban lifestyles. Most meals
do not have such a precise meaning, and perhaps many meals do not provide any
clear meaning at all. This does not constitute an objection to the idea that there are
gustatory artworks. First, because criterion (5) is not a necessary condition for being
an artwork, it is simply something that many artworks provide. Second, because
even if the idea conveyed by a gustatory artwork is merely a less sophisticated idea
of harmony, balance, and pleasure, it is enough for us to aesthetically appreciate it.
And third, the gustatory experience can trigger our imagination in such a way that
as a reaction to it we can provide a further meaning—for instance, when tasting
an exotic meal, the idea of where the ingredients come from, both culturally and
geographically speaking, can arise.
Criterion (6) is about the idea that artworks are/should be challenging. This can
be understood in many ways, and it is of course usually meant to apply to standard
arts like music or painting. But one simple way in which it can be applied to the
case of gustatory artworks is that discovering new tastes or new combinations of
tastes can be challenging both in an immediate and intrinsic way, simply as a new
gustatory sensation (where its various features such as balance, harmony, complexity,
etc. play an important role), and also as a basis for cultural comparison and debate
(which relates (6) to (5))—a sharp, strong and stinky Bleu d’Auvergne cheese is quite
typical of one cultural background; earthy and musky Fenugreek spices are typical
of another; umami (うま味—‘pleasant savoury taste’) is typical of yet another, and
so on. It is common nowadays, at least in developed countries around the world,
to have easy access to any type of food and tastes, so we are not any more so
easily surprised and challenged, but the first time we taste something new, or when
we taste a new combination of tastes, we do (at least sometimes) have a challenging
gustatory experience. When it comes to very sophisticated gastronomic meals, wines,
or whiskeys, the whole point is sometimes (not always) to provide a novel, surprising
and challenging experience to the appreciator.
Concerning (7) and (8), quite trivially, it is the case that food, again especially
when it comes to elaborated meals, as well as wine or whiskey, requires tremendous
skill to be produced (this is (7)), and that it is of course highly relevant also as a
non-aesthetic object and has a non-aesthetic function—we do need to eat to stay
alive, after all (this is (8)). Focusing on the gustatory (and olfactory) aspect of food,
since this is the issue here, tastes and smells are of paramount importance when it
comes to spot unhealthy or rotten food, for instance.
§3. Quite clearly, what precedes indicates that we may consider gustatory artworks
as being genuine artworks indeed. There is of course the question about what kind of
food provides a gustatory experience which counts as an artwork and which does not.
The taste of a quickly, unskilfully, and badly made burger would hardly be such that
10 2 Extending the Limits I: Non-visual and Non-auditory Artworks
it would give rise to a gustatory artwork. But this does not provide an objection to the
claim that at least some gustatory experiences are artworks. The various features we
have seen above, namely harmony, unity, balance, complexity, simplicity, intensity,
passion, or pleasure, will be found in some gustatory experiences and not in others.
The same is true of any other type of art—my 6-years-old son’s drawings and Dalí’s
paintings do not exhibit the same amount of potential for being artworks either
(which does not imply that a child’s drawing cannot be an artwork). In section IV
below, I’ll come back to this general issue when I’ll examine the claim that ‘not
anything counts’ (that not everything turns out automatically to count as art in my
rather inclusive view), and also that not everybody’s taste provides a good ground
for evaluation.
Before we get there, let us turn our attention, in the next section, to another type
of non-visual and non-auditory artworks.
2.3 Proprioceptive Artworks
§1. Proprioception is an inner sense—the inner perception which provides us with
information about the position, the posture, and movements of our body. While
writing this book on my computer in my office, I am sitting on a chair and I know,
via proprioception, where my legs are and in what position they are, without having to
look at them. I don’t always (actually, almost never, in this situation) think about the
position or movements of my legs while I am writing this book, but the information
is readily and immediately available.
I’ll take here on board the idea that proprioception is a kind of perception (see
O’Shaughnessy 1998; Fridland 2011; for a critical discussion see Gallagher 2003).
The sense of sight and the sense of hearing give us the possibility of visual and audi-
tory perception, and the sense of proprioception gives us the possibility of an inner
perception of our bodies. It is a controversial matter to determine whether propriocep-
tion is a distinct sensory modality from the sense of touch or if both of these senses are
somehow variants of one and the same perceptual modality. O’Shaughnessy (1998)
argues that they are two distinct perceptual faculties, while Massin and Monnoyer
(2003) defend the view that proprioception and touch are one and the same sensory
modality. For my current purposes, it is not necessary to make a choice between
these two options—the important thing here is that proprioception can be reasonably
understood as a kind of perception. We have seen in the case of gustatory experiences
that they actually involve not only taste but also olfaction and touch, constituting a
complex multi-modal whole. Perhaps a similar claim can be made here: we can
reasonably say that proprioception, even under the view according to which it is a
distinct sensory modality from the sense of touch, is often supplemented and accom-
panied by the sense of touch. Plausibly, I know where my legs are and in what
position they are not only via pure proprioception but also via the sensation of how
they touch the floor and the chair on which I am sitting. Indeed, our body always
encounters some kind of resistance from the external world, often sensed by touch,
2.3 Proprioceptive Artworks 11
which provides information about its posture, position, and movement. So, either the
sense of touch and the sense of proprioception are one and the same thing, or they
are two different sensory modalities but they often combine into a complex whole
which provides us with the relevant information. Both options are compatible with
what I am going to say below about proprioceptive experiences and proprioceptive
artworks, and for the sake of brevity (as in the case of gustatory artworks) and I am
only going to use the label “proprioception”, while keeping in mind that touch plays
aroleaswell.
§2. I am going to talk about three types of activities: dance, martial arts (espe-
cially kata), and climbing, but of course my purpose is not (only) to make a specific
claim about these three activities, but to argue for the general claim that there are
proprioceptive experiences which ‘count’ as artworks. [Other sport activities or even
any other activities engaging in the relevant way with one own’s body could provide
other examples (Kilian Jornet, a Spanish professional runner and ski mountaineer,
explicitly claims that running races are artworks.4)] Before we start, two caveats are
needed.
First (as we have also seen in the case of gustatory experiences), dance, karate, or
climbing not only provide proprioceptive experiences, on which I’ll focus here, but
they also provide visually accessible objects/events of perception for viewers who
can appreciate a ballet, a kata, or a climber’s ascent from the third-person perspective.
The case of dance is perhaps the most obviously and standardly such that it gives rise
to a visually accessible artwork. The same can be said about kata (which are indeed
very similar to choreographed dances), and perhaps more controversially about a
climber’s movements while climbing a route, but I am not going to discuss any of
these cases since they are (when/if they are) cases of visual artworks. My focus will
be on proprioception.
It is true that dancers watch themselves in mirrors, and so do martial arts practi-
tioners, in order to improve and adjust their movements. Climbers, especially profes-
sional climbers, use video recordings to watch themselves climb and to analyse their
movements from the (public) third-person perspective. Adam Ondra, arguably the
best climber alive (who climbed in 2017 the world’s first 5.15d/9c route Silence in
Norway—the most difficult route in the world) uses motion capture technology—in
the same way the movie character Gollum was created, Ondra climbs with a number
of sensors on his body, and this then allows him to watch a computer generated 3D
model of himself climbing, and to analyse his movements in fine detail (see Bocek
et al. 2018). But skilled dancers, karateka, as well as climbers rely most of all on
proprioception to know whether a movement or a posture is correct or not. Mirrors,
video recordings, and computer models can help, but a good practitioner will only use
them as additional, secondary tools. The experienced practitioner will mostly appeal
to her proprioceptive experience to adjust her movements/posture and improve her
skills. (This is less true in the case of novices, who first have to learn before being
able to rely on their proprioceptive experiences.) This is why (again, similarly to
4Kilian Jornet, “Run or Die: The Inspirational Memoir of the World’s Greatest Ultra-Runner”,
VeloPress.
12 2 Extending the Limits I: Non-visual and Non-auditory Artworks
what we have seen in the case of gustatory experiences), in a way that goes in the
other direction than the use of mirrors or recordings, advanced practitioners would
sometimes train blindfolded, in order to rely only on proprioception and touch to do
what they are doing. (This is more common in martial arts, but some climbers also do
train blindfolded in the secure environment of an indoor climbing wall.) Depriving
themselves of the sense of vision, which is so crucially important that it tends to
occupy the largest part of their normal conscious experience, they can then focus
better on the properly proprioceptive experience and learn how to better exploit it.
Marc Veyrat asks his guests to taste his meal blindfolded to highlight the gustatory
experience, and the idea is here the same when it comes to proprioception.5
In short, in the case of dance, kata, or climbing, we have a public performance,
visually accessible by viewers from the third-person perspective, but there also is a
private proprioceptive experience of the dancer, karateka, or climber; an experience
which is only accessible to the one who is doing the performance. The view I want
to defend concerns the latter, and I will claim that it can give rise to proprioceptive
artworks.
A second introductory point to keep in mind concerns the fact that, as
O’Shaughnessy (1998, §1) puts it, “[proprioception] takes a back seat in conscious-
ness almost all the time”. This is true: as mentioned before, most of the time, I am
not actively proprioceiving the position of my legs while I am writing this book.
Thus, a first requirement for there to be a proprioceptive artwork is that the relevant
proprioceptive experience must (of course) be conscious and must (importantly) be
focused on. This is why dance, kata, and climbing are such useful and good exam-
ples—indeed, practitioners of these activities are typically invited, by the very nature
of what they are doing (at least, if they are doing it right), to focus on their proprio-
ceptive experience. They need to pay attention to their proprioception. This is what
O’Shaughnessy (1998, §2.a.1) refers to as “introspective proprioception”, where our
bodily position, posture, and movement are the focal point of our attention. Some
sport activities are about being quick and about reacting and executing movements
in such a quick way that they need to be almost automatic. While such ‘automated’
movements can also sometimes be found in martial arts, dance, or climbing, more
often than not practitioners of these activities have the luxury of taking their time
to consciously and in a very focused way execute their movements. Climbers often
pause between movements and think about the next hard movement before going for
it, this is fully part of what climbing is about. Thus, they focus on the contraction of
their muscles, on the very precise way their body is positioned at the moment and
they very carefully imagine what the next movement must be and in what position
5I am not going to explore here the possibility that sexual activity can also provide proprioceptive
experiences that could be artworks. But I do not see, prima facie, a principled obstacle to such
a claim. Note that a blindfolded sexual experience (or an experience taking place in a fully dark
environment) is appreciated by some practitioners, precisely in order to allow proprioception and
touch to play the central role in their experience, without the influence of visual elements. Note what
Schrenk (2014, p. 112) says about sex-work: “Would, for example, a sex-worker’s performance on
one’s body, where intense proprioception is secured, be art? […] If however, such meaning can be
given to the sexual acts […] there is probably no reason why sex-work could not become an art”.
2.3 Proprioceptive Artworks 13
their body will be after that next movement, before they actually do it—the harder
the route, the more this is the case. Perhaps climbing is one of the best examples of
this, and perhaps even more so than kata or choreographed dances where a larger
amount of automatic execution is often required, in order to guarantee speed and
fluidity. As it happens, climbers tend to focus and to consciously pay attention to
their movements at all times (except if the route is easy and does not require to focus
so much). This is also due to the fact that dancers and karateka often repeat the
very same sequences of movements—involved in the same kata or the same dance—
while climbers, once they successfully climbed a given route, typically move on to
try another one and as a consequence they cannot ‘automatically’ repeat the same
(sequences of) learned and repeatedly practiced movements (‘speed climbing’ is an
infamous counter-example—often discarded by rock climbers as not really being
proper climbing at all, partly precisely for the reasons I just mentioned). Paying
attention is important, otherwise the aesthetic experience of one’s proprioceptive
experience is lost. The same is true in the case of gustatory experiences as well: even
the very best of gastronomic meals can fail to give rise to a gustatory artwork if is
it quickly eaten while watching TV and if the one who eats it simply does not pay
attention to what it tastes like.
§3. One of the very best climbers alive, Chris Sharma, says that climbing is like
dance on the rock: “Climbing is an artistic, creative thing.[…] Climbing is a full-
body sport from your fingers to your toes, but at the same time, it’s like a dance on
the rock. It’s about being strong and fit but also graceful and elegant and efficient
on the rock.[…] It’s not just about being super strong.”6For Sharma, as a skilled
practitioner, as well as for most rock climbers, it is just obvious that climbing is
not only about strength but—very importantly—about elegance and beauty. Adam
Ondra’s climbing training for the next Olympic Games in Tokyo 2020 does actually
involve ballet dancing—precisely and explicitly to work on the elegance of his body
movements.7This is why I am going to focus on rock climbing as being a good
example of an activity which can give rise to proprioceptive artworks. But I do not
mean to claim that there is something special about climbing here. Schrenk (2014)
explores this claim in detail when it comes to martial arts, and I’ll mention some
useful points of comparison below. Barbara Montero argues for the possibility of
proprioceptive artworks when it comes to dance: “proprioception is an aesthetic sense
and […] one can make aesthetic judgements based on proprioceptive experience.[…]
One can deem a certain movement beautiful based on one’s proprioceptive experience
of the movement.[…] athletes, models, and perhaps even those with natural grace,
may sense the beauty of their movements proprioceptively but the proprioceptive
aesthetic sensibility of the dancer is perhaps the most pronounced.” (Montero 2006,
p. 231). This is one of the reasons why, according to Montero, the best evaluators of
the aesthetic properties of a dance are people who are dancers themselves and who can
imaginatively ‘share’ the proprioceptive experience of the one who is dancing. In my
view, Montero is basically right except perhaps for the very last point in the citation
6Interview by Morty Ain for ‘ESPN, The Magazine’, July 2013.
7See Ondra’s Youtube video: https://youtu.be/0KfE2ONpO20.
14 2 Extending the Limits I: Non-visual and Non-auditory Artworks
above, since in my view the aesthetic sensibility of climbers or karateka is also very
high. Sharma says that climbing is like dance on the rock, and it is easy to see how
kata are similar to choreographed dances—in this way, we find similar elements and
similar types of proprioceptive experiences in all of these three activities. Relevantly
to the purposes of the discussion here, all three activities exhibit the aspects and
features that are significant for the claim that there can be proprioceptive artworks.
Let us, then, focus on climbing in some more detail.
§4. As an outsider to the world of rock climbing, one might think that climbing
is about getting to the top of a mountain or a rock wall. Perhaps this is so because
there is some amount of vagueness surrounding alpinism, Himalayan expeditions,
and rock climbing—and because, after all, these all often involve climbing mountains
where a successful practitioner does often get to the top of some summit. I am going
to leave alpinism and mountain climbing aside, and only focus on what is often
referred to as “rock climbing” or “sport climbing”. Rock climbing is not so much
about getting to the top of something, it is about sequences of perfect movements.
Take a common situation: a rock climber tries for the first time a route and finds
it utterly impossible to climb. Perhaps, she manages to climb some sections, but as
a whole the route appears to be too difficult. She just does not see what to do in
order to connect the dots and make a successful ascent without falling or stopping.
Sometimes, a particular movement just requires more strength than what she has.
But often, the failure or success is not just a matter of sheer strength. Even a climber
strong enough to climb a given route might be puzzled by it at first. Indeed, climbing
routes are puzzles—for the body and for the mind. As Nguyen (2017) puts it, climbing
is a “hyper-intellectual” sport. In order to successfully complete a given route, one
needs to ‘solve’ it—and, importantly, one needs to solve it with one’s own body as
well as one’s imagination. A climber needs to try, again and again, in order to feel
and find the precise position of all8parts of her body, her body weight distribution,
the parsimoniously applied amount of required strength (while keeping strength for
the remaining part of the route), as well as the order in which the holds need to
be grasped in a very precise and carefully balanced manner. Once such a sequence
of subtle and refined movements is found, all there is to do is to execute it; but
this is the less interesting part of the job and it is—usually—less difficult than the
process that lead to the personal discovery of how the route should be climbed. In
many climbers’ experience, once the puzzle has been solved, the route that seemed
impossible at first becomes actually rather easy to climb—sometimes, it is surprising
how something impossible becomes so easy to do. Thus, rock climbing is all about
finding a harmony between oneself and the route. Once this harmony is found, as
Nguyen (2017) nicely says, “you dance your way up that wall”. Indeed, this is the
very point of rock climbing—again, it’s not about getting to the top of a mountain
or a wall, and not just because there are usually much easier ways to get to the top
anyway, but importantly because a climber typically does not want to complete a
8Including even the head. Adam Ondra is known to have a long neck, which allows him to use
the weight of his head to counterbalance the weight of other parts of his body, when he climbs
particularly difficult routes.
2.3 Proprioceptive Artworks 15
route and arrive to the top just by applying brute strength, but rather by finding the
best, most elegant, and most economical way to execute the required sequence of
movements to finish the route in a ‘clean’ and balanced way.
Thus, as a proprioceptive affair, rock climbing is full of aesthetic experiences.
We find here, quite obviously and strongly, all of the common features of aesthetic
experiences mentioned earlier such as harmony, symmetry, unity, passion, pleasure,
balance, intensity, complexity, simplicity, and elegance. A climber’s movement can
be awkward and can only succeed by applying sheer strength, but as I emphasized
above, a climber will not be happy with such a success—she’ll be after a movement
that feels right: grace must combine with power to provide a feeling of a precise and
economical movement, executed with simplicity and elegance. Such a movement is
often both simple and incredibly complex: it is simple because it proprioceptively
feels so once it is mastered and gracefully, fluidly performed; and it is complex
because it often involvesmany micro-movements and individual position adjustments
of all parts of the climber’s body, in very much detail. This is why it can take a long
time before a climber ‘solves’ a particular section of a difficult route, since it requires
many, many attempts.9
This kind of activity requires the practitioner to focus in a very strong way on
her proprioceptive experience—otherwise, quite simply, it will just not work. Many
climbers report that while they climb they manage to be incredibly intensely focused
just on what they are doing and proprioceiving.10 As Nguyen (2017) puts it: “Some
of the most focused and attentive I’ve ever been in my life is on a hard climb—
mind zeroed in on tiny ripples in the rock for my feet, exactly the angle of my ankle,
whether I’m holding the most grippy part of the rock with my hand, the exact level of
force I need to push with on my foot as I slide over to the next hold.” This is, indeed,
the perfect case of what O’Shaughnessy (1998, §2.a.1) refers to as “introspective
proprioception”. In a very focused way, climbers are then conscious of their own
movements, as well as the posture and position of their body, in great detail and in a
very demanding way, and the aesthetic experience they are having then arises from
their proprioceptive experience. A climber’s movements (and complex sequences
of movements) just have to be balanced, harmonious, unified, simple and complex,
economical and gracefully fluid—otherwise, she will just not succeed to complete
a difficult route. Thus, the very nature of rock climbing is such that, when done in
a correct way, it actually forces the practitioners to have a proprioceptive aesthetic
experience. This is then where the intense pleasure and passion of most climbers
comes from.
§5. Let us now consider the list of criteria we have seen in Chap. 1(§3–4) for
something to be an artwork, and let us see how they apply to proprioceptive expe-
riences such as those we can find in rock climbing, martial arts, and dance. We
9Tommy Caldwell and Kevin Jorgeson’s first ascent of the most difficult multi-pitch route in the
world “Dawn Wall” (5.14d/9a, 32 pitches, El Capitan, Yosemite) provides an excellent illustration
of this. (See the documentary film “Dawn Wall” (2017) about this ascent).
10Alex Honnold’s free solo (i.e. without a rope) ascent of “Freerider” (5.12d/7c, 900m, El Capitan,
Yosemite, 6/3/2017) is a staggering example of focusing capability. (See the documentary film "Free
solo" (2018) about this ascent).
16 2 Extending the Limits I: Non-visual and Non-auditory Artworks
have already seen that, qua proprioceptive experiences, climbs possess many of the
standard features artworks typically have. We have seen that the very nature of rock
climbing is such that it actually forces the practitioner to focus on her propriocep-
tive experience and that it also forces her—if she wants to successfully climb a
difficult route—to have aesthetic experiences. Indeed, the proprioceptive aesthetic
experience—in short, the elegance of a movement—will help the climber to climb
better. Points (1) and (3) are thus quite obviously satisfied, as is point (4)—indeed,
the emotional response to the experience of oneself climbing is often strong, both
when things work in the perfect and elegant way they should, where the sheer joy
of feeling oneself climbing fluidly and well is significant, as well as when, exasper-
atingly, things do not work. Many climbers would shout aloud in strong frustration
when they fall, especially if they do not understand what it is exactly that they are
doing wrong—that is, in a situation in which they did not yet solve the puzzle of a
given route. Adam Ondra is quite known to shout very loudly when he falls, using
some very strong language (fortunately, to be understood only by the Czechs).
(1), (3) and (4) are also commonplace in the case of martial arts and in the
case of dance. Proprioceptive experiences of kata and of dance also importantly
involve movements that aim at being balanced, harmonious, unified, both simple and
complex, as well as economical and gracefully fluid. It is also true, in both of these
cases, that the very nature of these activities is such that it requires the practitioner to
focus on her proprioceptive experience, and that this aesthetic proprioceptive expe-
rience is a good guide to doing things right. When it comes to martial arts, Schrenk
(2014, p. 112) makes a comparison with ‘standard’ visual and auditory arts and he
even claims that the former probably satisfy criterion (4) better than the latter: “While
many auditory and visual arts affect the intellect more than the emotions (or, at least,
emotions only mediated through the intellect), a proprioceptive art would be directly
in touch with one’s feelings.” Indeed, when immersed in a proprioceptive experi-
ence, one does feel very strongly and immediately her own body and the emotions
associated with what is going on.
Of course, not only do climbers, karateka, or dancers have aesthetic proprioceptive
experiences and strong emotions associated with them, but they also, often and
passionately, talk about them, articulating aesthetic judgements about what they
are doing. When it comes to climbing movements, the word “elegant” is perhaps the
most often pronounced, as well as the word “beautiful”. Adam Ondra comments on
his climbing of “Robin Ud” (9b/5.15b): “The beauty of movement is very important
for me. Very often I can find it on some rocks that a lot of people would think of as
very crappy. But the beauty of movement is there […].”11 As we have seen above,
these are not metaphorical uses of this vocabulary; rather, the fact that aesthetic
judgements about a climb are so natural and so common points to the fact that they
are indeed understood as such by skilled practitioners. (Remember Sharma’s explicit
claim above that “climbing is an artistic, creative thing”.) Thus, point (2) in the list
of criteria from Chap. 1is also satisfied, and of course not only when it comes to
climbing but when it comes to dance and kata as well.
11Adam Ondra’s first ascent of “Robin Ud”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbK4MqpFsVc.
2.3 Proprioceptive Artworks 17
Point (5) is perhaps less clear-cut. Do climbs, kata, or dances, qua proprio-
ceptive experiences, have the capacity to convey meanings and ideas? We must
be careful here not to mix up ideas and meanings that can be conveyed by the
activity as such, and the ideas and meanings that can be conveyed by the activity
as a proprioceptive experience. Indeed, it is uncontroversial that climbing involves
many values and ideas—perhaps, to cite only one, a sense of trust and friendship,
since a climber’s life quite literally depends on the skills of the other climber who is
belaying her. In the case of karate, many of the values associated with it even lie quite
outside the scope of the activity as a combat technique—indeed, “karate” means
“empty hand” (空手) and is often supplemented by “d¯o” (道) which means “path”
or “way”; the idea being here that karate-d¯o is not merely a fighting system but that
it also is a spiritual system: the way of the empty hand. But such ideas and meanings
are not directly linked to the proprioceptive experience of climbing or of performing
akata. Rather, they are overall ideas concerning these activities. Ideas and meanings
exhibited by the proprioceptive experiences of climbers, karateka, or dancers are
linked to the feelings of one’s own body. They can involve ideas of health, fitness,
‘feeling good in one’s body’, harmony between one’s body and one’s mind, and they
can perhaps convey values such as perseverance and effort, since when a practitioner
succeeds in performing a perfect sequence of graceful and powerful movements, all
the hard training suddenly comes together and makes sense. Most of all, the ideas
involved in such proprioceptive experiences are, more directly, the ideas of balance,
harmony, unity, elegance, simplicity, and efficiency.
Point (8) is about the fact that artworks can also be objects which have relevant
non-aesthetic features and a non-aesthetic function. Here again, we must be careful
to distinguish between such features that climbing, karate, or dance possess as human
activities and the features they possess qua proprioceptive experiences. Indeed, karate
is a fighting technique, whose practical use is one of the very reasons for its existence,
while climbing does of course have the practical use to, say, get to the top of a moun-
tain. Both disciplines, and of course dance as well, can also be appreciated as sport
activities, improving one’s health and fitness. But again, this is not related directly to
the proprioceptive experience had by the practitioners. The practical usefulness of
the proprioceptive experience is something we have already seen above: it helps the
practitioners to climb, dance, or perform a kata better. The proprioceptive experience
is indeed one of the best guides to performing the perfect movement and sequences of
movements. As already noted, this is particularly interesting since it is the aesthetic
aspect of the proprioceptive experience—the elegance, balance, harmony, unity, etc.
of the movements—that helps the practitioner to improve her skills. This, then, also
relates to point (7), namely the idea that artworks require skill to be produced, which
is here quite obviously the case, since in order to be able to have a proprioceptive
experience which exhibits the aesthetic features of beauty, elegance, harmony, etc.,
long and hard training is required. The challenging aspect (point (6)) of such aesthetic
proprioceptive experiences lies then in the fact that they encourage and stimulate the
practitioner—the artist—to do better and better. Indeed, these experiences are such
that they provide the standard by which success or failure are measured, where here
again it is their aesthetic properties that allow one to say whether one has succeeded or
18 2 Extending the Limits I: Non-visual and Non-auditory Artworks
not—a climber, a karateka, or a dancer would not be entirely happy with a sequence
of movements which would look right from the third-person point of view (and
which would, say, successfully get her to the top of a mountain) but which would
not ‘feel right’ and graceful/elegant from the introspectively proprioceptive private
first-person point of view.
2.4 Training, Skill, and Evaluation
§1. Let us quickly sum up where we are. I have started in Chap. 1by listing some
criteria for something to be an artwork, while pointing to the fact that they do not
constitute necessary and sufficient conditions and that they do not provide a strict
definition of what an artwork is. Both when it comes to gustatory experiences and
to proprioceptive experiences, I have then provided study cases which satisfy these
criteria. As a consequence, we can then rather safely conclude that they qualify as
being artworks.
§2. In this sense, I thus offer here a very inclusive view about what counts as art
and what does not (in Chap. 3, I’ll extend it even further). I take this to be a welcome
output—the good news that we can produce and enjoy art more broadly than what
one would perhaps have thought. But this does not mean that ‘anything goes’, that
anything is an artwork; let us now consider some constraints as to what counts as an
artwork as well as constraints concerning the evaluation of artworks.
When it comes to martial arts, Schrenk (2014, p. 108) puts the point nicely: “If
you ‘play’ your body well, like a musician plays a sonata on her instrument, you
have ‘harmonious’ proprioceptions. Many factors, including precision, speed, the
appropriate kinetics and mental and physical fortitude have to be in proper control: not
any performance will lead to something aesthetic and it takes the practitioner a long
stony way under the austere guidance of their master to learn the right movements
with the correct intrinsic dynamics. Yet, again, just as a violinist hears when his
performance is right the martial artist will, with enough practice, herself feel when
her movements are correct. As with sonatas, it is then that proprioceptive pleasure is
greatest.” Schrenk is right, as we have also already seen in III.§5 above with respect
to criterion (7), concerning climbing, karate, and dance. Schrenk’s formulation—
‘playing one’s body’—nicely sums up the idea that exactly as it takes time and effort
to master a musical instrument, it takes time and effort to master one’s own body to
be able to produce movements that are both efficient and graceful—and it is only
then that an appropriately aesthetic proprioceptive experience can take place, giving
rise to a proprioceptive artwork.
The same is true when it comes to gustatory artworks. Marc Veyrat’s peculiar
meal is an example of tremendous skill and a result of great effort and training. A lot
of things need to come together and need to be done well in order to provide such a
gustatory experience to the guests of his restaurant. This is, of course, true of many
well-done and carefully prepared meals, gastronomic or not. More often than not, the
greater the skill and effort, the better and stronger the aesthetic gustatory experience.
2.4 Training, Skill, and Evaluation 19
Granted, there are exceptions and interesting borderline cases. This is one of the
reasons why I suggested in Chap. 1that there can be nothing like a strict definition
of what counts as art and what does not. Indeed, it is sometimes the very point of
an artwork to question where the limits of art lie—and to explicitly cross them.
Well-known, now standard, cases include Marcel Duchamp’s ready-mades, which
are ordinary objects put on display, such as his “Fountain” (1917). Another striking
well-known example is John Cage’s composition “433” (1952) which consists of
three movements:
First movement—silence (00:00—00:30).
Second movement—silence (00:31—02:53).
Third movement—silence (02:54—04:33).
Are there similar cases when it comes to gustatory and proprioceptive artworks?
Could there be a kata where the karateka would simply stand still for, say, 4 min and
33 s? On the one hand, we could think that such a performance would hardly count as
a karate performance at all, since the point of a kata is to be an imaginary combat—a
combat against imaginary opponents. Not moving at all might not be the best fighting
technique to overcome attacking adversaries. On the other hand, such a performance
might actually provide a valuable proprioceptive (and introspective) experience, as
many meditation techniques have shown (Zazen is a well-known example). This
proprioceptive experience might then exhibit aesthetic features and might be subject
to aesthetic appreciation, and thus count as an artwork, even if perhaps only in the
way in which a borderline case might count as such. When listening to his “433”,
Cage wants us to pay attention to the silence, and to the noises there always are—
silence is actually, under normal conditions, never complete. The same could be said
of the karateka who is standing still—concentrating on her stillness, she might notice
all of the unavoidable, small and usually imperceptible movements of her body.
When it comes to borderline examples of gastronomic meals, Marc Veyrat
provides, here again, a striking example: another of his meals on the menu consists
in an empty plate. It’s quite a puzzling situation for a guest to be presented with a
small, white, simple, empty plate. Marc Veyrat then sits down at the table with the
guest and tells her a story about how, when he was young, in order to have less work
and save water when doing the dishes, in his family they would use plates from both
sides—first, the regular side for the main meal, and then they would return the plate
and use its bottom to eat desert. After telling this story, he then returns the empty
plate, and the guest discovers that in the small hollow space on the bottom of the
plate is a skilfully integrated crème brûlée. Thus, in the end, the plate is not empty
after all, and so the situation is here not directly comparable to Cage’s “433”. But
at first, during the first stage of the process, the guest does have a type of a gusta-
tory experience ‘of nothing’, given the empty plate and given the fact that she is
at first led to believe that there is nothing more to it that just the empty plate. This
might then be understood as an equivalently borderline experience to the listening to
Cage’s composition. One might understand the absence of a gustatory experience as
a gustatory experience of an absence—indeed, after having tasted and eaten a dozen
spectacular gastronomic meals, the guest is suddenly presented with only the taste
of his own empty mouth, which does have a taste that we usually do not notice, and
20 2 Extending the Limits I: Non-visual and Non-auditory Artworks
Veyrat’s empty plate might precisely provide us with an experience where we focus
on it (similarly as Cage’s composition makes the listener focus on the silence, which
is usually never entirely devoid of any sound either).
Such cases explore the limits of what can be acceptable as being an artwork
or not, but the point is not different, as we have seen, in cases of gustatory or
proprioceptive artworks and cases of more standard (although borderline) visual
or auditory artworks. In my view, there is no strong reason to exclude such cases
(Duchamp’s “Fountain”, Cage’s “433”, Veyrat’s empty plate, a karateka’s perfor-
mance of standing still); they can count as being interesting borderline cases of
(visual, auditory, gustatory, proprioceptive) art. But the main point I would like to
emphasize is that they all fall or stand together: if, say, we accept Cage’s composi-
tion as being an auditory artwork, we should then accept all the other cases, and vice
versa.
§3. To conclude this section, some remarks concerning the evaluation of artworks
is in order. To start, it is important to keep in mind that the evaluator’s competence and
skill play an important role. Indeed, exactly as not any proprioceptive or gustatory
experience is an artwork, not everybody is a good evaluator of such pieces of art.
This is why the aesthetic judgements involved in criterion (2) from Chap. 1must
always be judgements of skilled and experienced practitioners. When it comes to
climbing, this is utterly obvious: in order to be able to see the beauty, elegance,
grace, fluidity, and efficiency of one’s movements while having the proprioceptive
experience of climbing, one needs to have enough experience to be able to compare
this experience to previous experiences and one—quite straightforwardly—needs to
be skilled and strong enough to be able to perform the movements in the first place.
Easy climbing routes usually do not require any particularly elegant movements;
beginner’s routes would be no harder than climbing a somewhat complicated ladder.
The more technical a route gets, the more it will require movements that are precise,
and that need to be elegantly and harmoniously combined to produce sequences of
movements such that the climber will be able to successfully climb the given route.
In short, a novice will simply not be able to execute the movements that are required
to provide a sufficiently complex and rich proprioceptive experience to give rise to a
proprioceptive artwork. The very same is true when it comes to martial arts, and dance
as well. Of course, in some situations, some amount of elegance and proprioceptive
beauty can be achieved without too much skill, but usually it will be true that the more
a practitioner is skilled the more she will be able to create a proprioceptive experience
that will be an artwork—in virtue of exhibiting harmony, symmetry, unity, balance,
complexity, simplicity, intensity, passion, pleasure. Thus, criterion (2) from Chap. 1
is perhaps even more important when it comes to proprioceptive artworks than when
it comes to visual and auditory artworks, which are more easily accessible to an
unexperienced spectator. Indeed, in the case of proprioceptive artworks, the spectator
also needs to be the artist, which means that the spectator needs to be skilled enough
not only to appreciate the work of art, but also to create it. (I’ll say more about the
private aspect of such artworks in the next section below.)
In addition to her skill and experience, the evaluator’s aesthetic taste also plays an
important role. In the case of climbing, a skilled climber will often have a preference
2.4 Training, Skill, and Evaluation 21
for some types of routes, requiring some types of movements. Some climbers will
prefer strongly overhanging cliffs requiring a lot of work with the managing of one’s
own strength (economy and fluidity are here crucially important), as well as a number
of acrobatic moves where one sometimes needs to place one’s feet higher than one’s
hands, etc. Other climbers will prefer vertical routes with very tiny holds, where
the key notions will be precision and balance. In the evaluation of the aesthetic
proprioceptive experience, a climber’s capacity and personal taste will thus play a
central role when she’ll make an aesthetic judgement about a route. But the notion
of taste here is not just one of a mere liking. As Sibley puts it: “When I speak of
taste […], I shall not be dealing with questions which center upon expressions like
‘a matter of taste’ (meaning, roughly, a matter of personal preference or liking). It
is with an ability to notice or discern things that I am concerned.” (Sibley 1959,
p. 423; see also Telfer 2008, p. 13) This is quite clear in the case of gustatory
artworks, where experts would often evaluate a meal positively even when it does
not fit their own personal preferences. Such ‘taste’ is indeed trainable and more
objective than a simple liking. An expert will learn to distinguish different flavours,
fragrances, and so on. Experts—both when it comes to gustatory experiences as
well when it comes to proprioceptive experiences—will also often share standards
by which they can evaluate the gustandum or the proprioceptive experience. The
capacity to discern beauty of such trained and experienced experts will thus be
higher than the capacity of a novice, whose taste will be closer to a mere liking. This,
of course, echoes Hume’s (1757) claim that not everybody’s taste counts and that
not everybody can play the role of a good art critic. Not surprisingly, experienced
karateka, experienced climbers, and good chefs will thus often agree on the aesthetic
properties of a proprioceptive/gustatory experience, and will evaluate the resulting
proprioceptive/gustatory artworks accordingly. Of course, such artworks are private
and cannot be shared directly; as a consequence, they cannot be evaluated directly by
more than one evaluator. But this does not mean that any comparison is impossible,
it only means that the evaluators must keep in mind the private aspect of such pieces
of art, and use indirect means to compare their respective experiences—quite simply,
by talking about them.
2.5 ‘Private Versus Public’—Some Remarks
§1. Excluding gustatory and proprioceptive experiences such as those we have seen
above as being artworks on the ground that they are accessible only to the one and
only subject who has them—that is, that they are private rather than public—would
be question-begging. Indeed, it is often distinguished between on the one hand an
artwork and on the other hand the experience that an artwork triggers (see the rather
standard criterion (3) on the list in Chap. 1), but here, in the case of proprioceptive
and gustatory artworks, the private experience is the artwork itself, making this case
special in this sense. But even if this does not prevent such experiences to be artworks,
their privateness is quite a striking feature, as opposed to more standard, public,
22 2 Extending the Limits I: Non-visual and Non-auditory Artworks
visual or auditory artworks, which invites now some remarks on the ‘private/public’
distinction.
§2. From the experiential proprioceptive/gustatory point of view, two subjects can
have the same type of experience but never, of course, the same token. Two karateka
can perform the same kata, two climbers can climb the same route, two dancers can
perform the same choreographed dance, and two guests at Marc Veyrat’s restaurant
can taste the same meals. But of course, the private aspect of such experiences is
central to them, as Barbara Montero clearly puts it when it comes to dance: “It is
not merely that the proprioceptive experience seems private since, arguably, there is
a sense in which all experience is private. Rather, it is that the object of experience
appears to be private: the object of visual experience, a painting, can be experienced
visually by many observers, while the object of proprioceptive experience, one’s
own body, can be proprioceived only by oneself” (Montero 2006, p. 234). When
it comes to climbing, Karlsen (2010) rightly remarks that the appreciation of the
public performance—watching a climber’s performance—is not sufficient in order
to be able to appreciate the aesthetic aspect of climbing. We need to “include the
experiential aspect of a climb” (Karlsen 2010, p. 221), since “a route being at the limit
of one’s skills is a criterion that […] is valid for most climbers” (p. 222). The expe-
riential, private aspect of proprioceptive experiences is thus central to their aesthetic
appreciation. This is less the case when it comes to gustatory experiences, since the
same bit of food can be consumed by several subjects who can then have the same
(or a very similar) experience, at least to some extent, limited by the size/quantity
available of the given piece of food. While you cannot proprioceive my body, I can
taste a bit of your dinner. The privateness aspect of proprioceptive experiences is
thus special and stronger than in the case of gustatory experiences. However, the
extent to which gustatory experiences can be similar and shared is very limited
when compared to experiences of visual and auditory art, where a great—perhaps in
principle unlimited—number of observers can have access to the very same artwork.
We might thus suggest that visual and auditory works of art dominate our normal
understanding of what art is precisely because they have a public character—thus,
they are more easily shareable and more easily accessible (since, as noted above,
the spectator does not need to be the artist). As Monroe (2009, p. 134–135) rightly
emphasizes, artworks such as paintings and sculptures also are permanent objects,
as opposed to performance arts and, relevantly to our discussion, to proprioceptive
or gustatory experiences, and this is one more reason for the former to dominate a
standard understanding of what art is, since they are thus easily accessible to many
observers. Monroe mentions Hegel as defending what he refers to as the ‘Consump-
tion Exclusion Thesis’, namely the idea that the fact that food is consumed/destroyed
while being appreciated does not allow for its possibility to count as an artwork.
Proprioceptive and gustatory experiences are even more impermanent and private
than that. But, precisely because they are private, proprioceptive and gustatory
artworks might provide a stronger aesthetic experience. As Schrenk points out,
“while a well conducted performance of a hyong or kata is a pleasure to watch, it is
an even greater joy to perform it oneself”, and he adds that, for this reason, in order
to enjoy an even stronger experience “sometimes hyongs are a blindfolded exercise
2.5 ‘Private Versus Public’—Some Remarks 23
where the practitioner has to rely entirely on proprioception” (Schrenk 2014, p. 108).
Perhaps the point here can be put as the idea that in the case of private artworks, the
aesthetic experience is more immediate, and that it is thus related more directly to
our emotions and feelings, which are central to aesthetic experience (see criterion (4)
from Chap. 1). Indeed, as already mentioned above, the subjective perspective is here
more important than the objective perspective, and the privateness of the experience
is often put forward as being decisively important: “As it turns out, it’s not that inter-
esting to watch somebody climb [The Angler—a climbing route in Joe’s Valley].[On
a technical route with tiny holds], to somebody watching from outside, it looks…
like nothing. Even for an experienced climber, it’s pretty boring to watch somebody
else climb [The Angler].[…] In this particular climb, all those fascinating internal
movements are invisible to the external eye. The aesthetics of movement, here, are for
the climber alone” (Nguyen 2017). Thus, on the one hand, private artworks have the
‘drawback’ of not being shareable as easily as visual and auditory public artworks,
but on the other hand, precisely because of this aspect, they provide special, and
perhaps stronger, aesthetic experiences.
§3. In the case of private artworks, there is a lot of inter-subjective variance and
instability, since, strictly speaking, any given private work of art is unique. But even
private artworks often have publicly accessible recipes. This is quite literally the
case when it comes to gustatory artworks, where a recipe would provide the means
to create a meal which can then provide a given gustatory experience. The situation
is very much the same when it comes to a kata or a choreographed dance, which
are repeatable in the sense that the practitioner follows a precise recipe, as well as
often the guidance of a more experienced practitioner.(Literally, “kata” means “form”
(形)). In the case of climbing, route setters prepare the conditions in which a climber
can then enjoy such and such an aesthetic experience. This is not very different from
the case of music where—often—a score provides the recipe for a given auditory
work of art.
There are then two ways to publicly share private artworks: first, by following
the same recipes, and second by inter-subjectively sharing the private aesthetic expe-
riences by describing them verbally. Perhaps, there is a third way. Montero (2006)
argues that an observer can genuinely proprioceive the aesthetic features of the move-
ments of someone else (she bases her argument on the way ‘mirror neurons’ work).
Perhaps we can say that there are forms of imaginative empathy where in an indi-
rect and fictional but genuine way an observer can put herself in the situation of the
one whom she is observing and—at least in a limited way—imaginatively share her
proprioceptive experience. While one cannot feel what it is like to be in a qualitative
mental state of somebody else, one can sometimes in a very relevant way empathize
and get a good grip on the ‘what-it-is-like’ qualitative aspects of the experience of
the other. We cannot share qualia directly, but we can use empathy and imagination
to share them indirectly, even though only in a limited way of course. Climbers can
often be seen watching other climbers going through a particularly interesting and
hard section of a route and, while standing below and simply watching, they would
mimic the movements of the one who is climbing, thus ‘sharing’ her own experience.
24 2 Extending the Limits I: Non-visual and Non-auditory Artworks
Kata, climbing routes, and choreographed dances prescribe specific movements
and specific proprioceptive experiences. Meals prescribe specific gustatory experi-
ences. In this way, someone can prepare the conditions under which someone else
will enjoy a private artwork. In the case of gustatory artworks, the role of the appre-
ciator is rather passive, while in the case of proprioceptive artworks the role of the
appreciator is often very much active. We might then suggest that in the case of
proprioceptive art, the artist is to be identified with the spectator, while in the case
of gustatory art, the artist can be identified with the one who prepared the conditions
for a gustatory artwork to arise—say, the chef (who can, of course, be the very same
person).
Kendall Walton famously argued for the view that paintings are such that they
prescribe specific imaginings (see Walton 1990). He insists on the imaginative facul-
ties of the spectator. In Walton’s view, pictures depict by being props in games
of make-believe. To understand his point, consider games that children play—in a
game, an object can represent another object (say, a cardboard big box can represent
a car). In the world of the game, the box represents a car, not just because of its very
vague resemblance with something that a child can sit in, but mostly because one
has simply decided in an imaginary way that it does represent a car. When it comes
to depiction and pictures, Walton then appeals to the notion of ‘seeing-in’ and he
argues that there is an experience made of two elements: perception and imagination,
which are mixed together in a phenomenologically complex whole. In Walton’s view,
imagination permeates the perception of the picture, and this is how we see a given
painting as a marked surface, while at the same time we see in the painting whatever
the painting depicts. Perceiving and imagining thus are part of a single experience
of ‘imagining-seeing’.12
Imagination also plays a role in the appreciation of some gustatory and proprio-
ceptive artworks. Remember how Marc Veyrat uses his meal as a means to prescribe
a specific imagining about a walk in the forest. Kata, being imaginary combats
involving imaginary adversaries, also quite clearly prescribe very specific imagin-
ings, strongly and explicitly related to the movements the karateka is performing.
The prescription is public, while the artwork is private.
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12In Benovsky (2016), I argue that photographs also are narrative imagination-triggering media.
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Chapter 3
Extending the Limits II: Intellectual
Artworks
Abstract In this chapter, I defend the view that scientific and philosophical theories
genuinely (as opposed to metaphorically) possess aesthetic properties and that they
are genuine cases of artworks. In order to do so, I argue against the sensory depen-
dence thesis according to which aesthetic properties necessarily depend on sensory
properties. The case of intellectual artworks such as theories, as well as other cases
of works of art like novels, show us that there is no such dependence, and we can
then extend our understanding of what counts as art to such types of objects.
3.1 Aesthetic Properties, Sensory Dependence,
and the Case of Theories
§1. The main aim of this chapter is to discuss the case of scientific and philosophical
theories and to argue that they are genuine cases of what I’ll refer to as “intellectual
artworks”. “Conceptual artworks” would have been a more appropriate label, but
since the term “conceptual art” is widely used to talk about something else, I’ll use
“intellectual artworks” to avoid confusion. My main examples will be mathematical,
physical, and metaphysical theories, but I see no obstacle to extend what I will say
to other types of theories as well.
Adajian (2018, §1) classifies theories and mathematical proofs as having aesthetic
properties but not as being artworks—similarly to natural entities such as sunsets,
landscapes, or flowers. Perhaps the idea here is that theories are not human-made,
but that they exist out there and are discovered/appreciated by us. I adopt a different
view according to which theories are products of the intellectual activity of conscious
beings (mostly, in the sense of being theoretical models (see Paul 2012; Benovsky
2016, Part I).1The notion of being human-made thus plays a role here; we will see
that the idea that theories are created is important, and we will also see in Chap. 4
1In “Meta-metaphysics” (2016, Springer), I have already defended the view that theories possess
aesthetic properties and that these are crucial when it comes to their evaluation. In that book,
my overall focus was on how this justifies an anti-realist stance when it comes to the nature of
metaphysics. I shall not insist on this point here, but it is useful to keep it in mind. Here, I provide
© The Author(s) 2021
J. Benovsky, The Limits of Art, SpringerBriefs in Philosophy,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54795- 0_3
27
28 3 Extending the Limits II: Intellectual Artworks
the importance of human intervention in the case of artworks in other cases (namely,
painting and photography).
§2. The case of intellectual artworks is not only interesting for its own sake and
as a further extension of the limits concerning what counts as art and what does not,
but also as an interesting contribution to the debate about the claim that aesthetic
properties necessarily depend on sensory properties. This latter claim will thus be
the starting point for my discussion here. In Chap. 2, I argued for an extension of the
limits of art in order to fully include artworks based in perceptual modalities such as
touch, olfaction, taste and proprioception, in addition to the more standard auditory
and visual perceptual modalities. In this Chapter, I’ll start by raising the question
whether our senses do always have to play a role or not. In his excellent book
The metaphysics of beauty2Nick Zangwill presents an elaborated argument against
physicalist aesthetic realism which is based, inter alia, precisely on the premise
that aesthetic properties do metaphysically necessarily depend on sensory properties
(Zangwill 2001; Chaps. 8 and 11 and also Zangwill 1998). Even though I share
the argument’s conclusion, I will argue here that this premise is false, and so the
argument does not go through. This has a consequence not only for us who want
to reject physicalist aesthetic realism. The idea behind this premise actually plays
an important role in Zangwill’s own overall view as well: he defends a version of
the view that aesthetic properties are response-dependent, and that “the responses
that aesthetic properties depend on are […] sensory responses” (Zangwill 2001,
p. 200). Here again, even if at the end of the day I would also like to embrace a
response-dependence view of aesthetic properties, I think that the aesthetic/sensory
dependence claim is incorrect, and so it cannot be used in the defence or in the
formulation of this view. So it is in a spirit of tough love that I will argue here against
the aesthetic/sensory dependence claim. In order to do so, as mentioned above, I will
focus on counter-examples to this claim such as the beauty of theories, proofs, and
theorems. In short, I will defend the claim that theories—and the like—do possess
genuine aesthetic properties, where these do not depend on any sensory properties.
§3. Here is how Zangwill formulates the aesthetic/sensory dependence thesis: “I
shall defend a weak dependence thesis: Aesthetic properties depend in part on sensory
properties, such as colors and sounds. Just as something has moral properties only
if it has mental properties, so, according to the weak dependence thesis, aesthetic
properties are properties that something has only if it has sensory properties. […]
The thesis is not the strong thesis that the aesthetic properties of a thing depend
only on its sensory properties. The thesis is that sensory properties are necessary for
aesthetic properties, not that they are sufficient. […] [W]ithout sensory properties,
there would be no aesthetic properties.” (Zangwill 2001, p. 127).
Put in these terms, what I will argue for is that sensory properties are neither suffi-
cient nor necessary for aesthetic properties. In order to better understand Zangwill’s
claim, let us illustrate it by what he says about the beauty of literature. There is, of
a different defence with a different focus. There is some overlap between this chapter here and the
last chapter of the earlier book.
2Zangwill, N. (2001). The metaphysics of beauty. Cornell University Press.
3.1 Aesthetic Properties, Sensory Dependence, and the Case … 29
course, “the music of words” of a poem or a novel, and these are sensory properties
of a literary work. But one could claim that these are not the relevant properties.
Rather, it can be thought, the semantic properties of a literary work are those that
matter—this is the content of the work. If this is so, since these semantic properties
are not sensory properties, literature is a counter-example to the aesthetic/sensory
dependence thesis. Zangwill replies that while of course there can be great value in
the semantic content of a literary work, it is not an aesthetic value. Not every value of
a novel or a poem is an aesthetic value. As he says, a novel can be clever, inspiring,
or moving, via its semantic content, but these are other than aesthetic values. If a
novel has aesthetic properties at all, Zangwill claims, they “derive from the particular
choice of words, because of the way they sound” (Zangwill 2001, p. 137). Zangwill
makes here a distinction between aesthetic value and artistic value: originality, for
instance, is said to be an artistic value, but not an aesthetic one (see Zangwill 2001,
p. 108)—in general, artistic value is a broader category, including aesthetic value as
one of its components (see Zangwill 1998, p. 74–75, 2001, p. 11;58;137).
The case of literary works is highly relevant. Firstly, it is very useful in order to get
a better understanding of what the aesthetic/sensory dependence claim amounts to—
we can really see it at work here. Secondly, and importantly, the treatment Zangwill
provides of this case can be doubted for the same reasons we will have to doubt
the case of theories and the like. The reason why I will focus on theories rather
than novels lies in the fact that counter-examples such as a metaphysical theory or
a mathematical proof cannot be said to possess anything like a “music of words”.
Their formulation is often very “non-musical”, often formal, and there is nothing like
the particular choice of words that can play any significant role here “because of the
way they sound”. Thus, they are sharper counter-examples than novels: in the case
of novels, it is always possible, for the defender of the aesthetic/sensory dependence
thesis, to claim that their beauty comes from the “music of words”, while this strategy
is just not available in the case of theories, theorems, or proofs. The defender of the
dependence thesis has then only one option available to her—namely, to claim that
such objects are not (and cannot be) beautiful at all, that they do not (and cannot)
possess aesthetic properties at all. Since there is nothing relevantly sensory in the
way such objects are experienced/grasped by us, unlike in the case of novels, theories
then either cannot possess aesthetic properties at all and do not constitute a counter-
example to the aesthetic/sensory dependence thesis, or they can and the thesis is
false.
As we will see, there are reasons to think that theories, theorems, and proofs do
possess genuinely aesthetic properties. If this is true, and if as a consequence the
aesthetic/sensory dependence thesis fails, then since it has to be abandoned anyway,
it could/should perhaps also be abandoned in the case of novels, which would allow
us to accept that semantic content of a literary work can exhibit genuinely aesthetic
properties as well.
30 3 Extending the Limits II: Intellectual Artworks
3.2 The Beauty of Theories
§1. The reason I will offer to think that theories, theorems, proofs, or particular
steps in proofs3(for the sake of brevity, I’ll often just say “theories”) can possess
genuine aesthetic properties is simple: they have all the typical features that objects
that we typically claim to possess aesthetic properties have. The strategy is here
similar to the strategy I used in Chap. 2to claim that gustatory and proprioceptive
experiences are genuine cases of artworks. For now, I focus on the claim that theories
possess aesthetic properties and I am not (yet) claiming that theories are artworks—
I’ll do so in due course below. Theories can exhibit features such as unity,simplicity,
harmony, and symmetry (as we shall see shortly), they have the capacity to cause
passion (or other responses), they are “fitted to give a pleasure and satisfaction to the
soul” (as Hume 1975, p. 299) puts it). Importantly, they are often said and judged
to be beautiful (or not). Quine (1948, p. 22) is among the most famous examples:
“Wyman’s overpopulated universe is in many ways unlovely. It offends the aesthetic
sense of us who have a taste for desert landscapes […]”. Quine is far from being alone
in attributing aesthetic properties to theories. Almost every conference or academic
workshop contains such examples, where a theory, a theorem, or a philosophical
argument is labelled as being beautiful or elegant (or not). This is no mere loose
speaking during a talk, one finds such attributions of aesthetic properties to theories
seriously expressed in published work. Here are two examples, one from physics:
“The foundations of the [general relativity] theory are, I believe, stronger than what
one could get simply from the support of experimental evidence. The real foundations
come from the great beauty of the theory.[…] It is the essential beauty of the theory
which I feel is the real reason for believing in it” (Dirac 1980, p. 10), and one from
metaphysics: “It is easy to feel […] an intellectual joy in contemplating a theory so
elegant and beautiful as four-dimensionalism, and it is tempting to accept the theory
simply on this basis, utilizing arguments to rationalize more than justify” (Sider 2001,
p. 74). The list of examples could go on and on.4On the one hand, such statements
of course do not constitute any kind of proof of the fact that theories and the like do
possess genuinely aesthetic properties, but on the other hand such explicit statements
by serious practitioners seem at the very least to indicate that there is nothing wrong
with the idea that they might.
§2. To have an example in mind, consider the bundle-bundle-bundle theory (for
a detailed discussion of this view, see Benovsky 2006). I mention it here because I
think that it nicely illustrates the first point stated above, namely the idea that theories
(but also theorems, proofs, and the like) can exhibit features such as symmetry,
harmony, and unity. Let us focus on its structure. According to the bundle-bundle-
bundle theory, (i) ordinary material objects are bundles of properties (this is the first
level of bundling), (ii) ordinary objects persist through time by having temporal parts,
which means in this case that they are temporally extended bundles of the bundles
that are the temporal parts (this is the second level of bundling), and (iii) ordinary
3Rota (1997) takes such steps to be the best examples of mathematical beauty.
4Derkse (1992) and McAllister (1999) feature a number of relevant quotes and references.
3.2 The Beauty of Theories 31
objects have their modal properties in a way similar in which they have temporary
properties, that is, by having modal parts—in short, by being bundles of all of their
modal counterparts (this is the third level of bundling). One may like this view or one
may dislike it for many different theoretical reasons, but I think that it is undeniable
that the theory’s structure possesses a kind of elegant symmetry, unity, and harmony
that makes it very beautiful, where these features lie in the fact that it appeals to the
same notion of bundling to solve three different issues in the same way. It provides
the same solution to three different puzzles: the problem of the nature of material
objects, the problem of their persistence through time, and the problem of de re
modality. One can then see this theory as being an abstract structure that is balanced,
symmetrical, and harmonious, and that has a kind of unity that lies in the fact that
the same notion is being used in different places to solve different problems. Here
is an illustration of what this abstract structure could look like when schematically
represented (on this figure, a person named “Cyrano” has, in the actual world, a big
nose at t1, but he then undergoes plastic surgery and has a small nose at t2and t3;in
another possible world, Cyrano has a small nose all along).
"having a small nose"
"being human"
"having brown eyes"
…
t1t2t3
Wactual
W2
t1t2t3
Cyrano
"having a small nose"
"being human"
"having brown eyes"
…
"having a small nose"
"being human"
"having brown eyes"
…
"having a big nose"
"being human"
"having blue eyes"
…
"having a small nose"
"being human"
"having blue eyes"
…
"having a small nose"
"being human"
"having blue eyes"
…
§3. In addition to the fact that theories can possess features such as symmetry,
harmony, and unity, and to the fact that they are often judged to be beautiful, it is also
the case when it comes to theories that, as in the case of typical works of art such
as paintings or symphonies, their aesthetic properties can be said to be grounded5in
their non-aesthetic properties such as (i) internal consistency, (ii) explanatory power,
(iii) simplicity, (iv) parsimony, (v) preservation of our intuitions, or (vi) compatibility
5Grounding captures better what we want to say here than supervenience. See Benovsky (2012)for
a detailed defense of this claim.
32 3 Extending the Limits II: Intellectual Artworks
with other (philosophical and/or scientific) theories, to cite only the most common
ones. To compare theories to paintings, for instance, such properties are akin to colour
distribution on a canvas, the thickness and quality of the paint, the way it was placed
on the canvas using brushes in such-and-such a way, and so on. These non-aesthetic
features of theories are subject to controversies, they are weighted, evaluated, and
attributed (or not) to the theories at hand, exactly as we can evaluate and appreciate
non-aesthetic features of paintings and symphonies—precisely in order to attribute
aesthetic properties to them.
§4. Such attributions of aesthetic properties to theories (and the like) are also,
exactly as in the case of ‘typical’ works of art, context-dependent. Most artworks
such as paintings or novels get a part of their aesthetic value from the context in which
they were created. The first cubist paintings have great value precisely because they
were the first. Milan Kundera’s novels written before 1989 get a part of their beauty
from the political and historical context in which they were written. Of course, these
are controversial claims in the eyes of the friend of the aesthetic/sensory dependence
thesis, since she could argue that these values are not aesthetic values. But this is not
really the point I want to focus on here and now—I am not arguing for or against
the claim of context-dependence (even though I am strongly sympathetic to it). The
point here is that in both cases—that is, whether one accepts the context-dependence
claim or not—one can hold the same claim when it comes to theories. The context-
dependence idea, if one accepts it, is simply that not only intrinsic properties of an
object are relevant. Of course, they are—colours and shapes are central when it comes
to paintings, for instance. But these are not the only relevant non-aesthetic properties
of an object in which its aesthetic properties are grounded. Some extrinsic relational
properties also need to be taken into account. Arguably, the context of creation of an
artwork plays this role (see, inter alia, Walton 1970),6or Levinson (1984, p. 93–94).
Imagine two indistinguishable paintings that are qualitatively indiscernible—they
are exact duplicates that consist of the same arrangements of paint. The idea here is
then that they could still have different aesthetic properties depending, say, on the
time at which they were created.
Again, the role context plays in the having of aesthetic properties is of course
controversial, but were it to be accepted in the way suggested above, the same idea
could then be applied to the case of theories, perhaps even more obviously. Regarding
scientific or philosophical theories, the context in which they were created matters
greatly, the relevant context being the state of scientific or philosophical knowledge
at the time of the formulation of the theory. Ptolemy’s theory of the movement of
planets was, at its time of creation, a tremendous achievement in systematic thought
and careful observation. In this context, given the state of astronomical knowledge
in the second century, there is no doubt that Ptolemy’s epicyclic model was highly
beautiful and elegant (to anticipate the conclusion that theories do possess aesthetic
6Walton makes a distinction between narrow and broad non-aesthetic properties of objects, in
which its aesthetic properties are grounded. The narrow properties are the intrinsic ones, like colors
and shapes, and the broad properties are the relational ones, like, precisely, the context in which an
object was created.
3.2 The Beauty of Theories 33
properties), and had great value. Not so much today, if evaluated from today’s stan-
dards: there are now simpler, more efficient views with greater explanatory power,
greater compatibility with other scientific theories, etc. (remember the incomplete
list of the (i)–(vi) non-aesthetic properties in §3 above that theories possess and
in which their aesthetic properties—if they have any—are grounded). The (rather
trivial, I take it) point is: exactly as in the case of standard works of art, when it
comes to evaluation of theories, context of creation can matter.
In this way, the suggestion here amounts to a ‘broadening’ of the
grounding/supervenience base. This then solves a problem raised by Scruton (1974,
p. 36), who criticizes the aesthetic supervenience thesis when he says that “dif-
ferent emergent ‘properties’ can depend on precisely the same set of ‘first order’
properties”. What he has in mind here is that one and the same work of art can be
context-dependently characterised as sad or as joyful, without contradiction. (For
a discussion of this, see for instance Pettit 1987; Zangwill 1994; and MacKinnon
2001). We can now respond to this objection simply by pointing out that, once we
include the context of production (and the context of evaluation—see more on ‘taste’
below) in the grounding base, it is not the case that ‘different emergent properties
could arise from the same base’.
Concerning theories, the kind of relevant context is the state of philosophical
and scientific knowledge at the time of the formulation of the theory. Ptolemy’s
theory is a good illustrative case, as is for instance Thales’ materialist conception of
the world, based on the idea of water as the central element out of which all other
existing material entities are somehow construed: such a view, evaluated in the light
of today’s scientific and philosophical knowledge, is certainly false and it is not very
satisfactory with respect to several of the non-aesthetic evaluative criteria (i)–(vi) in
§3 above. Does this mean that Thales’ view cannot be said to be beautiful? It does not,
for the reason mentioned above: the context of origin of this theory is to be taken into
account when evaluating the theory’s beauty. When we say that aesthetic properties
of theories are grounded in their non-aesthetic properties, the grounding base has
to be broadened to include their context of origin as well as the other non-aesthetic
features—and, from the point of view of scientific and philosophical knowledge in
the sixth century B.C., Thales’ theory represents quite an achievement, in terms of
systematization and philosophical reflection.
§5. There is a consequence of this approach which is welcome in the case of
artworks such as paintings, but which might be distinctly undesirable in the case of
metaphysical theories: Ptolemy’s and Thales’ views (and, of course, many an ancient,
medieval, and modern view) could very well emerge from the evaluative procedure as
being judged just as beautiful as the best scientific and metaphysical theories we have
today. This state of affairs is acceptable in the case of, say, paintings since there is no
good reason for claiming that today’s paintings are in any principled way superior to
older ones, but it is an unacceptable result in the case of scientific and philosophical
theories, because it does not do justice to the progress of scientific and philosophical
knowledge. Indeed, we want to be able to say that even if it is not always the case,
generally speaking, our theories become better—more beautiful—over time (recall
Sider’s and Dirac’s quotes; indeed, all this becomes crucially important if one takes
34 3 Extending the Limits II: Intellectual Artworks
the beauty of a theory to drive one’s choice in deciding which particular theory is
supposed to be the best—in Benovsky (2016, Part II) I discuss this in detail). But
it seems that, if aesthetic properties are grounded not only in their intrinsic non-
aesthetic features but also in a wider base that includes the context of origin, it could
perhaps even be possible to judge Thales’ view as better (because more beautiful)
than some of the most elaborate theories we have today.
But there is an easy remedy to this problem. For, unlike paintings or other art forms,
science and metaphysics exhibit one important feature: their knowledge accumulates
over time. Another way of bringing out this point is to say that the contemporary
context of creation of scientific and metaphysical theories does, in a certain sense,
include all past contexts, since it includes all the successful discoveries of the past.
This is why the contemporary context is to be privileged over any other past contexts,
and, consequently, contemporary theories can be said to be better than past ones (if
they are beautiful enough) and claims about the progress of knowledge in science
and philosophy can be secured.
This being said, the general idea I wish to put forward here still is analogous to
the case of artworks like paintings. Its core claim is simply this: since the context
of origin is part of the base in which aesthetic properties of theories are grounded,
the context of contemporary theories is richer than the context of ‘older’ theories.
Suppose I see a painting in the museum which I intuitively like and find beautiful
without however knowing anything about its context of creation. Suppose further
that a museum guide comes along and provides me with interesting background
information about the relevant context, for instance, that the painting was created in
the Czech Republic in the seventies and that it has a particular political significance
as a metaphorically veiled rejection of the communist regime at the time. After I
have been given this information, I might find the painting even more beautiful than
before. Suppose the guide goes on to tell me about the painter’s life and reveals
to me even more about the context of the painting’s creation, for instance, that the
painting also offers a metaphorical reference to the day when the painter lost his
child—I might again find the painting now even more beautiful. In short, what I want
to express here is the general thought that, the richer the context, the (potentially)
more beautiful the painting will be to the beholder. What is more, as we have seen, it
seems that this applies even more clearly in the case of scientific and philosophical
theories.
§6. In Chap. 2, section IV, we have seen how important it is that the evaluator of
proprioceptive and gustatory artworks (as well as any artworks in general) should be a
skilled expert in the given field. We have also seen how the individual taste of the eval-
uator matters. The former point is perhaps even more (and more obviously) the case
when it comes to intellectual artworks. But let us first focus on the taste of the evalu-
ator. Indeed, one can argue that not only, as we have already seen above, the context
of creation of an object has to be included in the basis in which its aesthetic properties
are grounded, but that the taste of the evaluator has to be included as well. As before
(see Chap. 2, IV), the notion of ‘taste’ is here a rather technical one, and does not
amount to a mere the-first-thing-which-comes-in-my-mind liking. Rather, the taste
that matters here is a capacity of a trained evaluator to discern the aesthetic properties
3.2 The Beauty of Theories 35
of objects.7Thus, taste is understood here as a rather sophisticated capacity, which
is in line with what Hume thought when he said that not everybody’s taste counts8
(in short, that not everybody is a good critic of art). As above in the case of the role
context plays, when it comes to taste as I shortly described it here, its role is contro-
versial. But here again, what matters mostly for my argument is that if one thinks
that taste does play such a role, it can then very well play this role in the situation in
which we find ourselves when it comes to theories, proofs, arguments, or theorems—
it is actually more than obvious that only a trained specialist can discern and weight
the non-aesthetic properties of such objects, and only such a competent evaluator
can then use his taste to make a claim about their beauty (think of Quine’s ‘desert
landscapes’). But not only this, since being an expert is not the same thing as having
taste. Being an expert is here a necessary condition, but not a sufficient one. (To have
an example in mind, perhaps the kind of “incredulous stare” that is many colleagues’
reaction to David Lewis’ modal realism is an expression of the idea that while Lewis
is a great expert, he has poor taste.) Thus, perhaps even more clearly than in the case
of works of art such as paintings, novels, symphonies, or in the case of proprioceptive
and gustatory artworks, it is true to say that in the case of theories and the like only
attributions of aesthetic properties by trained, qualified, and competent specialists,
who have a “good sense” as Hume puts it,9count. These attributions and judgments
are then part of what aesthetic properties of such objects can be grounded in—they
can enrich, together with context (see above), the basis in which aesthetic properties
are grounded. In short, only a trained and perceptive philosopher or scientist will
be able to notice and appreciate a theory’s beauty, and her taste and judgement is
crucially relevant to any attribution of aesthetic properties. There are two options here.
First, one can include taste directly in the grounding base, which makes the aesthetic
properties of theories response-dependent (that is, no appreciators, no aesthetic prop-
erties); or second, one can include taste only as a condition for the recognition of
aesthetic properties. While I have sympathies with the first option, my main point
does not depend on it: one can recognize the utmost importance of the role taste plays
in the attribution of aesthetic properties to theories even under the second reading.
3.3 Theories as Artworks
§1. In the preceding section, we have seen that theories, theorems, proofs, and the
like behave a lot like typical works of art such as paintings, symphonies, or novels
(as well as less standard artworks like proprioceptive and gustatory artworks). First,
7Remember what Sibley (1959, p. 423) rightly remarks: “When I speak of taste […], I shall not be
dealing with questions which center upon expressions like ‘a matter of taste’ (meaning, roughly, a
matter of personal preference or liking). It is with an ability to notice or discern things that I am
concerned.”.
8Hume (1985, p. 240–241) also adds that such qualified judges also have to be practiced in the
attribution of aesthetic properties, have to have a “good sense”, and have to be intellectually honest.
9See Footnote 8.
36 3 Extending the Limits II: Intellectual Artworks
as we have seen, they can exhibit features such as unity, simplicity, harmony, and
symmetry. Second, they can cause appropriate responses (emotional or other) in their
evaluators. Third, they are often said and judged to possess aesthetic properties by
competent scientists and philosophers. Fourth, they possess relevant non-aesthetic
features in which the having of aesthetic properties can be grounded. Fifth, the context
of their creation matters, as well as the taste of competent evaluators.
Thus, I submit, there is no doubt that theories and the like have all it takes to
be able to have aesthetic properties. There just is no reason to think the opposite.
In the relevant sense, they behave exactly like other objects which possess aesthetic
properties do. The only reason to resist the idea that they can genuinely instantiate
aesthetic properties would be to say that they violate the aesthetic/sensory dependence
thesis, but that would be question-begging.
It is now a short step to take in order to claim that theories not only possess aesthetic
properties but that they are artworks. To repeat, they exhibit features standardly shared
by works of art such as harmony, unity, balance, intensity, and complexity. With no
doubt, they give rise to passion and pleasure. They behave like artworks and are often
treated as such by skilled and serious practitioners. Remember our (non-necessary,
but still highly relevant) criteria from Chap. 1:
(1) Artworks possess aesthetic properties
(2) Artworks are subject to aesthetic judgements
(3) Artworks have the capacity to trigger aesthetic experiences
(4) Artworks have the capacity to trigger emotions
(5) Artworks have the capacity to convey meanings and ideas
(6) Artworks are challenging (both for the artist and the observer)
(7) Artworks require skill to be produced
(8) Artworks qua objects can have relevant non-aesthetic features and a non-
aesthetic function.
(1), (2), (3), (4) and (8) have already been established by the discussion above
in this Chapter. (5), (6) and (7) are just utterly obvious in the case of intellectual
artworks such as theories, proofs, theorems and the like. In the same manner as in
the case of proprioceptive and gustatory artworks from Chap. 2, I thus submit here
that there is no reason to deny that there are intellectual artworks such as scientific
and philosophical theories.
§2. Zangwill himself rejects any attributions of aesthetic properties to theories
or theorems (which would then deprive them of the possibility of being artworks)
because he takes such attributions to be merely metaphorical. Again, a comparison
with what he says about novels is useful: “Contents have purely structural properties.
The Odyssey, for example, has a harmoniously proportioned overall construction.[…]
It might be suggested that we can appreciate such structures in themselves, in the
way that we appreciate the temporal structure of a piece of music or the visual
structure of an abstract pattern.[But w]hen we value structural properties of content,
it is because of its role in the presentation of a story which has an independent moral,
3.3 Theories as Artworks 37
political, religious, or emotional appeal. So if we use words like “beautiful” and
“elegant” to describe properties of a plot, that use is metaphorical.” (Zangwill 2001,
p. 139–140), my italics) He then mentions the case of theories and asks: “But why
should we agree that the properties we appreciate here are aesthetic ones? There
are intellectual pleasures, of course, but that should not encourage us to deem these
pleasures aesthetic pleasures.” (Zangwill 2001, p. 140) Thus, he accepts that theories
or theorems are often said and judged to possess aesthetic properties by competent
scientists and philosophers, but he claims that such attributions and judgments of
aesthetic properties are merely metaphorical. The reason he provides to think that
this is so is that such theoretical objects have a purpose. Theories, theorems, and
proofs are here to accomplish something, they are created to do some scientific work.
They are not, as I understand Zangwill, created to be beautiful, they are created with
something completely different in mind—perhaps something like scientific truth.
Suppose, for the sake of argument, that this is so.10 But why does having a purpose
prevent anything from being able to possess aesthetic properties? Should we perhaps
be tempted to accept the general idea that artworks always lack functionality (“l’art
pour l’art”) and that, therefore, theories cannot be artworks? Look again at (5) above
and also especially at (8)—these are part of a normal understanding of what counts
as being a work of art. We have also seen these criteria at work in the case of
proprioceptive artworks (martial arts have the purpose of defending oneself, rock
climbing has, or at least can have, the purpose to get to a summit of a mountain,
and so on) as well as in the case of gustatory artworks (food provides nourishment).
Perhaps you could say that my own strategy is here question-begging and that I am
making things too easy for myself by including (8) in the list of criteria for what
counts as an artwork. So, let me just try to say that (8) is simply highly plausible.
Many traditional craftsman’s tools are built for a reason and with a purpose, but many
of them are genuinely beautiful works of art themselves. Having a purpose does not
prevent anything from being beautiful—and why would it then prevent something
from being an artwork? Indeed, having a purpose and fulfilling it in an efficient
and elegant way can itself be beautiful—a craftsman’s tool’s simplicity and elegant
efficiency is something to be aesthetically appreciated. The same, I submit, is true of
theories—the way they do their work, the simplicity and parsimony, say, with which
they are able to explain some complex phenomena, is exactly what one can find
genuinely beautiful about them. And, precisely because of the way they accomplish
their purpose, they certainly are “fitted to give a pleasure and satisfaction to the soul”,
as Hume11 puts it. Why deny then theories and the like the status of an artwork? As we
have seen, they exhibit all of the typical features standard works of art possess—and
the fact that they do indeed have a practical purpose does seem to be simply irrelevant
to invalidate the claim that they can be artworks themselves. Is it question-begging
to say that saying otherwise would be question-begging? I hope to have conveyed a
high plausibility to the claim that it is not.
10In Benovsky (2016) I offer reasons to doubt that, but I shall not press this point here.
11Hume (1975, p. 299).
38 3 Extending the Limits II: Intellectual Artworks
§3. To come back to the claim that attributions of aesthetic properties to theories
are metaphorical, Zangwill says, when it comes to scientific theories, that a theory
couldn’t be said to be beautiful if it did not explain the data. This is why he says
that we only metaphorically say that it is beautiful while what we are doing is just to
appreciate that it explains a lot of data in an efficient way. One way to resist this claim
is to remember the case of Ptolemy. When evaluated from today’s point of view, his
theory of the motion of planets certainly does not explain the data and certainly is not
very efficient. But it still can, I submit, be found beautiful. It has a beautiful structure,
it has an elegant and sophisticated way of accomplishing its task, it aims at simplicity
and harmony—in short, in has many of the non-aesthetic features in which aesthetic
properties can be grounded. Take another example, a contemporary one: very few
philosophers accept that David Lewis’s modal realism is true and that it really works
as an acceptable metaphysics of modality. But this does not take away the theory’s
beauty and elegance, probably grounded in its simplicity, straightforwardness, and
boldness. If you have a certain taste (qualitative rather than quantitative) for desert
landscapes, you’ll be struck by the theory’s beauty in a very clear way.
So, why to insist that attributions of aesthetic properties to theories and the like
are merely metaphorical? Again, one could think so precisely because it would be
at tension with the aesthetic/sensory dependence principle, but that would be, quite
clearly, question-begging. In Zangwill’s own terminology, one could perhaps want to
say that that theories and the like merely have artistic value, but not aesthetic value,
but there does not seem to be a (non-question-begging) reason for such a claim—there
just does not seem to be a reason to discard the aesthetic properties of such theoretical
objects as being genuinely aesthetic. When we appreciate, say, a structure of a theory
(or a novel, for that matter), we are not just appreciating the role it plays in how the
theory manages to explain the data in order to get to a scientific or philosophical truth
(or the role it plays in the story which has an independent moral, political, religious,
or other appeal). We can appreciate it for itself, for how elegantly structured it is, for
how nicely it makes things fit together, or for the baroque complexity it can have (if
you have a taste for the baroque rather than for desert landscapes).
§4. Thus, I submit that (a) scientific and philosophical theories, theorems, proofs
and similar can possess genuinely aesthetic properties, and that (b) given the relevant
ways in which they are similar to other kinds of works of art, it is at the very least
highly plausible to say that they count as artworks themselves. They have all it takes.
How do we come to the conclusion that paintings, say, can have aesthetic proper-
ties and that they are artworks? First, they have non-aesthetic properties in which
their aesthetic properties can be grounded (such-and-such a distribution of paint on
a canvas, for instance), and these can be discussed from many points of view, their
merits can be weighted and debated, and so on. Thus, paintings can exhibit symmetry,
harmony, unity, as well as many other non-aesthetic relevant features. Second,they
can produce relevant responses in their spectators. These can be emotional, intellec-
tual, or other—and by all means they are “fitted to give a pleasure and satisfaction
to the soul”. Third, they are often said and judged to possess aesthetic properties
by competent judges. Fourth, the context of their creation matters. Fifth,thetasteof
the competent evaluator matters. These—and as we have seen other—are the criteria
3.3 Theories as Artworks 39
that make us say that paintings can have aesthetic properties and that they are works
of art. And, as we have seen, theories and the like do satisfy all of these criteria as
well. This is why I think we should say that they can possess genuinely aesthetic
properties and that they are genuine cases of intellectual artworks.
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Chapter 4
Limits and Their Vagueness: The Case
of Paintings and Photographs
Abstract This Chapter explores limits between different kinds of works of art, with
a focus on painting and photography. I discuss the nature of photography in detail, as
well as several borderline cases of photographs, and I argue for the claim that there
is an irremediably vague boundary between photographs and (digital) paintings—as
opposed to a sharp limit between two different types of images.
4.1 On Photographs and Other Images
§1. Chapters 2and 3were about extending the limits of what counts as art. The
discussion there was centrally focused on the role our different perceptual modalities
play. En passant, in Chap. 2, I also shortly discussed two famous borderline cases
or artworks, namely, Marcel Duchamp’s ready-mades and John Cage’s composition
“433”. In this Chapter, I want to explore another type of limits, namely limits there are
between different kinds of works of art. My focus will be painting and photography. In
fact, photographs have been denied the status of artworks, and I will have something
to say about (that is, against) such a view. Thus, I will be interested in the differences
between hand-made paintings and photographs, while having in mind that the general
context of this discussion can be seen as a contribution to the debate about whether
photographs are artworks or not—as opposed to paintings. Indeed, even to articulate
this question, one needs to be able to make a distinction between photographs and
non-photographs. Kendall Walton thinks that “There is a sharp break, a difference of
kind, between painting and photography” (Walton 1984, p. 252). I will argue for the
opposite claim: the boundary between photographs and other types of pictures such
as paintings is an irreducibly vague one. Furthermore, as we shall see, the differences
between photographs and paintings are such that nothing prevents photographs from
being artworks.
In a sense, this Chapter is then about what counts as a photograph and what does
not. One way in which this question arises stems from new technologies that keep
changing our way of producing photographs, such as digital photography, which not
only has now widely replaced traditional film photography but also challenges the
very limits of what we count as a photograph. I shall discuss below at some length
© The Author(s) 2021
J. Benovsky, The Limits of Art, SpringerBriefs in Philosophy,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54795- 0_4
41
42 4 Limits and Their Vagueness: The Case of Paintings and Photographs
different aspects of digital photography, and I will also discuss the case of Light
Field cameras (Plenoptic cameras)—indeed, the photographs produced by a Light
Field camera can be re-focused after the photograph has been taken, which harbours
many interesting consequences with regard to the resulting image and the way we
interact with it.
But of course, the initial question also arises in the case of traditional film photog-
raphy as well as ‘traditional’ digital photography. The question amounts to asking
about what the essential features of photographs are—in short, what their nature is.
To answer this question, I shall examine in what follows some ‘borderline cases’ of
photography, thus trying to determine the ‘limits’ of what counts as a photograph and
what does not. In the process, several discriminating criteria and essential features
of photographs will be established.
§2. Before venturing into the discussion of the vague and controversial limits
of borderline cases of photographs, let us agree on two uncontroversial paradig-
matic cases of two kinds of images which definitely do count as photographs (all
photographs used in this book can be found in colour and higher resolution here:
https://www.jiribenovsky.org/thelimitsofart):
Photo 1 Film photography
4.1 On Photographs and Other Images 43
Photo 2 Digital photography
The first photograph was made using a traditional film technology (a film
camera, an enlarger, a developer, a stop bath, a fixer, …) and then scanned in
order to be reprinted here for the purposes of this book, while the second was taken
with a digital camera and (post)processed accordingly (using software, a computer
screen, …) before being reprinted here.
While there are many significant differences between the two photographs and
between the ways they have been created, one thing, I hope, is quite clear: both
of these images are photographs. One who would deny this would be implausibly
denying the obvious. Any claim, I submit without argument, that would deny that one
or both of these images are photographs would exhibit a conception of photography
far too restricted and constrained to be true to any artistic, philosophical, or common
sense notion of photography. (I shall discuss Roger Scruton’s notion of “ideal
photography” in II.§1 below.)
Thus, my first (and I hope entirely trivial) claim about the nature of photographs is
that both traditional film-made photographs and digital photographs are photographs;
more precisely, that no particular process of production (digital, chemical, or other)
is such that it is the only way of producing photographs. That is, photographs are not
in general essentially produced in a particular way.
The way digital photographs are produced actually mirrors the way traditional
film photographs are made.
44 4 Limits and Their Vagueness: The Case of Paintings and Photographs
Fig. 4.1 Film photography
unprocessed film
("latent image")
negative
photo1 photo2 photo3
film camera
light
developer
stop bath
fixer
enlarger
developer
stop bath
fixer
Fig. 4.2 Digital
photography
"raw" file
(not yet an image)
image file
photo1 photo2 photo3
digital camera
light
in-body or
additional
software
printer
monitor
…
4.1 On Photographs and Other Images 45
A photograph is a result of a whole process of production, with intermediate
stages, and while the nature of these stages is different in traditional photography
and digital photography, the overall principles are very similar with stages that play
the same (or very similar) role, in a different way. Now, one significant (practical)
difference between the two processes of production is the easiness with which digital
photographs can be altered by using appropriate software, at early stages of produc-
tion (before the photograph is created) and/or later in post-processing. Photo 2 above,
for instance, has been digitally manipulated during the process of production, both
when developing the RAW file and when adjusting the image file in order to produce
the final result—light has been improved, skin defects removed, eyes brightened, and
so on (follow the permalink mentioned above for a high resolution colour image).
But if the image has been “tampered with”, one could ask (and one often does ask),
does it still count as a photograph? Are digitally modified photographic images still
photographs, or are they some sort of ‘digital pictures based on a photograph’, or not
even that?
In the next section, I shall defend the claim that not only such digital pictures are
photographs, but that digital manipulation is in fact a necessary step in the process
of production of digital photographs.
4.2 Digital Manipulation
§1. Digital manipulation is an essential and necessary feature of the process of produc-
tion of digital photographs—very much in the same sense in which chemical manip-
ulation is essential and necessary to traditional film photography. Rejecting these
claims would lead one to an implausibly strong conception of photography, where
virtually nothing would count as a photograph. Roger Scruton seems to make such
a strong claim when he says that “actual photography is the result of the attempt to
pollute the ideal of [the photographer’s] craft with the aims and methods of painting”
(Scruton 1981, p. 578). As far as I understand his claim, Scruton means to say that we
have a notion of what an ideal photograph would/should be (namely, an image created
in a purely mechanical and causally closed manner, where no chemical or digital or
other human manipulation would play any part (more on this below)), but that actual
photography does not fit this standard and consequently actual photographs are not
really photographs.
Perhaps it is a terminological issue to decide whether actual photographs can be
properly called photographs or not, but perhaps it is an issue concerning the very
plausibility and relevance of Scruton’s claim—indeed, when talking about “ideal”
photographs, he just seems to be talking about something entirely different than what
most of us take to be photographs. For myself, I have to say I am interested in actual
photographs, and not in some non-existent (in fact, impossible, as we shall now see)
ideal type of images. Photographs as we know them are definitely not “ideal” in
46 4 Limits and Their Vagueness: The Case of Paintings and Photographs
Scruton’s sense (on this point, of course, Scruton is right). Look again at Figs. 4.1
and 4.2, and examine closely the way any photograph is produced. Let us focus on
the case of digital photography. First, light goes through a lens and hits a sensor; this
gives rise to a RAW file which is a recording of the way photons hit the photodetectors
constituting the sensor’s surface.1The RAW file is not yet a photograph—it needs
to be interpreted/converted in order to become an image, that is, an image we can
see anything on (or in). In the case of an automatic point-and-shoot digital camera,
this step is usually done by a piece of software built-in the camera which has been
programmed in a certain way in order to convert the RAW file into an image file
that can then be printed or viewed on a computer monitor. In the case of more
sophisticated cameras (typically, DSLRs), this automatic treatment of RAW files can
be deactivated and can be postponed—one can copy the RAW file on a computer and
only then manually convert the RAW file into an image file.
Once we keep in mind the way digital photographs are produced, it then becomes
simply obvious that digital manipulation is an unavoidable, necessary, and essen-
tial step in their process of production. Without digital manipulation, there would
simply be no photographs. Photons hitting the camera’s sensor produce electrical
inputs, which have to be “tampered with” in order to produce any picture at all. An
important point to note here is that these digital manipulation steps are not purely
mechanical and purely causal conversions of electrical inputs into image files; rather,
they are steps where decisions have to be taken—at the very least, these include deci-
sions about exposure, brightness, contrast, and white balance. As we have seen, these
decisions can either be taken by the photographer who manually works on her RAW
files, or they can be automatized, which means that they are taken not by the photog-
rapher herself but by the team of engineers who programmed the camera’s built-in
software. But one way or another, we easily see here that the steps that lead to a
creation of a digital photograph include, as a matter of necessity, digital manipula-
tion where decisions have to be taken. This is of course not the end of the story, but at
least a first rough version of the claim I want to defend is established: in principle, not
only digitally manipulated pictures count as photographs, but digital manipulation
is in fact a necessary step in the process of production of digital photographs.
This situation is entirely similar to the case of traditional film photography, where
some of the steps in the process of production include necessary chemical and other
manipulation (when using a developer, a stop bath, a fixer, and an enlarger), where
human intervention is as essential as it is in the case of digital photography (deci-
sions are taken about exposure, brightness, contrast, colour, and other in a way which
is technologically different from digital photography but in principle very similar).
There is, however, a significant difference between digital photography and tradi-
tional film photography, which I already mentioned above but which requires a more
detailed discussion: the easiness with which digital photographs can be digitally
altered and variously manipulated (either manually, or in an automatized way, or
both). As we have seen above, digital manipulation which includes a photographer’s
1This is of course only a very simplified explanation.
4.2 Digital Manipulation 47
intentional decisions is by necessity part of a process of production of any photo-
graph. But the way this is done, and the amount and type of these manipulations
makes a crucial difference. In the next section I shall focus on this issue.
§2. To start with, there is a general claim I want to make: there is no princi-
pled reason to “privilege” digital manipulations done using a software that is built
in a camera’s body to digital manipulations done using a software installed on a
computer—it would simply be entirely arbitrary to do so. A digital camera’s body
is equipped with a processor and a piece of software that manipulates RAW files in
order to produce image files, either in a fully automatized way where all decisions
have been taken by somebody else than the photographer herself, or in a more or less
manual way, where the photographer herself can program the settings of her camera’s
software to adjust the way RAW files will be converted into image files—typically,
these settings include at the very least exposure, brightness, contrast, saturation,
and white balance (but they can also include much more striking adjustments, for
instance in order to produce a photograph with a sepia effect, directly from the RAW
file). The claim I want to make now is that there is no principled difference between
this way of digitally manipulating one’s photographs using the built-in software, and
taking the RAW file out of the camera, copying it on a computer, and doing these
adjustments later on a computer. (Note that even in this way of doing things, it is still
open whether these manipulations are done manually, by the photographer herself,
or automatically, by the programmers of the software installed on the computer.)
Aconsequence of this claim, which I wish to fully endorse, is that a photographic
system, that is, the device that is used to produce photographs, is not only composed
of a camera and of components which are spatially located inside the camera’s body;
rather, it is a whole composed of many different components which can, of course,
all be spatially located inside a camera’s body, but there is no reason why they would
have to be so. Indeed, in the case mentioned above, the photographic system is
composed of a lens, a body, a processor, and a software (I am simplifying here, of
course) where some of these components are located inside the camera’s body and
other are located inside a computer. Thus the various components of a photographic
system can be spatially scattered, as well as, obviously, temporally scattered (since it
can be a long time after a RAW file has been created that it is converted into an image
file). None of this, I believe, is very controversial and unfamiliar to the traditional
film photographer. On the contrary, traditional photographic systems using film are
almost never entirely located inside a camera’s body (with the notable exception of
Polaroid cameras and similar): a dark room with all of its components is necessary
to produce a photograph.
To sum up my starting points: as a matter of necessity, digital photographs are
always digitally manipulated, either by the photographer herself or by somebody else;
these manipulations require intentional decisions; and they can be implemented using
tools located inside a camera’s body or using a computer. This now connects with
one of our initial questions, since we see here that there is no reason in principle to
reject digitally modified photographs as being photographs, including photographs
that have been “tampered with” on a computer. But not only is this not the end of the
story, it’s actually here that things start to get messy and conceptually difficult.
48 4 Limits and Their Vagueness: The Case of Paintings and Photographs
4.3 Vague Limits
§1. Indeed, given all we have seen until now, it will then be very difficult to find clear
criteria for discriminating digital manipulations (retouches) that will be allowed to
be part of a process of production of photographs and those that will not—any such
attempts take the risk of raising worries of arbitrariness. One may be tempted to
adopt two extreme attitudes to ‘solve’ this problem. Firstly, one could want to claim
that no retouches are acceptable, but this would be simply false, since as we have
seen a minimal amount of digital manipulation is necessary in order to produce any
photograph at all. One then may wish to adopt the opposite stance and claim that any
kind or amount of retouching is to be accepted. As a principled solution to avoid the
arbitrariness worry, this will of course do, but such an attitude seems to strain the
limits of credibility: think, for instance, of a photograph of the Eiffel Tower in Paris,
but where the RAW file has been digitally altered so much that the resulting image
is just a flat vivid green surface—it would seem difficult, to say the least, to count
such an image as a photograph of the Eiffel Tower, or indeed as a photograph at all.
§2. The problem here is a problem of vagueness: there is a limit to the type
and amount of retouches that a digital photograph can be altered with while still
remaining a photograph, but it is a vague, under-determined, and indeterminate one.
What we know here, following my considerations in the preceding sections, is that
the question is not whether digital manipulation is acceptable; rather the question is
about how much of it can be accepted. Thus, we understand here the nature of this
limit, but it is not an easy task to determinately say which it is.
It might help to consider some examples of borderline cases of digital images
which lie at the very limit between photographs and something else (as before, high
resolution colour versions can be found here: https://www.jiribenovsky.org/thelimits
ofart).
Image 3
4.3 Vague Limits 49
Image 4
Image 5
50 4 Limits and Their Vagueness: The Case of Paintings and Photographs
Image 6
As a first gut reaction, one might be tempted to disqualify Images 4,5, and
6as being photographs, since they are clearly composed of several more-or-less
continuous and more-or-less digitally manipulated pictures, but clearly accept Image
3as being a photograph since it is ‘just’ one simple image of a landscape. If this is
an intuition one has, it then tells us something interesting which puts us on the right
track towards understanding somewhat better where the limit between photographs
and non-photographs lies, since in fact Image 3has been produced by using several
photographs as well (more, actually, than in the case of Images 4,5, and 6). Here is
a screen capture of a production stage of Image 3:
4.3 Vague Limits 51
Image 7
The interesting thing to note about the above-mentioned intuition is that, often, if
one has it, then one accepts Image 3as being a photograph only until one learns about
the way it was produced (see Image 7). What is at stake here is to decide whether
the reason to accept (or not) digital pictures such as Images 3,4,5, and 6as being
photographs lies in what we see in the resulting image (which is something we see)
or rather in the way the image was produced (which is something we believe/know).
If one were to take the latter option, one might want to claim that none of the
Images above counts as a photograph since, somewhat trivially, there are several
photographs there, and not one. If, on the other hand, one prefers the first option,
then one might want to follow the above-mentioned intuition and claim that Image
3is a photograph, while, say, Image 6 clearly is not, but one may have doubts about
Images 4and 5since, while these images have been created in Photoshop by a
superposition of several different photographs, such a type of images can also be
obtained in traditional film photography by using a multiple exposure technique—
this where the “other option” sneaks in again. What the instability of this kind of
intuitions shows is that our concept of what counts as a photograph is such that it is
a result of both considerations about what we see (on the resulting image) and what
we believe (about the way it was created).
§3. This, of course, does not help us to ‘solve’ the vagueness problem by identi-
fying a clear limit between photographs and non-photographs, but, I want to submit,
it helps us to understand its nature. (Note that our puzzle behaves here as most puzzles
concerning genuine cases of vagueness do: typically, they do not have such a kind of
‘solution’; for instance, there just is no way to determine precisely, without arbitrari-
ness, a limit between “being bald” and “not being bald”, or between “being a heap”
and “not being a heap”—even epistemicist accounts of vagueness which claim that
52 4 Limits and Their Vagueness: The Case of Paintings and Photographs
there is such a precise limit take it to be unknowable.2) In order to deepen our under-
standing of the nature of this limit, I shall focus below on the case of photographs
produced by Light Field cameras, which is such that it creates photographs which
can be re-focused after they have been taken. But before I do so, a detour is necessary
in order to grasp another essential feature of the nature of photographs—this will be
the job of the Sect. 4.4
4.4 The Process of Production and Necessary Decisions
§1. Let us examine the process of production of photographs from a different angle.
As already mentioned, it has been widely argued that the process of production is
the core of the nature of photographs (both digital and traditional), and that it sets
photographs apart from other types of images, like paintings, because photographs
are the only images produced in a way which is purely mechanical, causally closed,
and which does not include human intervention. Thus, Bazin (1960, p. 7) famously
claims photography to be “[…] a mechanical reproduction in the making of which
man plays no part” and adds that “For the first time, between the originating object
and its reproduction there intervenes only the instrumentality of a nonliving agent.
For the first time an image of the world is formed automatically, without the creative
intervention of man.” Hopkins (2012) defends, in his own (different) way, a similar
claim as well: “[…] photography, in contrast [with hand-made pictures], involves a
causal chain free from the influence of people’s beliefs and experiences […].” Similar
claims have also, for very different reasons, been endorsed by Roger Scruton (see
Scruton 1981) and Kendall Walton (whose motivation was to defend his famous trans-
parency thesis about photographs: “Objects cause their photographs and the visual
experiences of viewers mechanically; so we see the objects through the photographs.
By contrast, objects cause paintings not mechanically but in a more ‘human’ way, a
way involving the artist; so we don’t see through paintings” (Walton 1984, p. 261).
There are many important, interesting, and true claims in the neighbourhood
of these quotations, and many of them I do share with their authors (for instance,
Walton’s transparency thesis strikes me as correct, for independent reasons). But we
have already seen that taken at face value these claims about the allegedly purely
mechanical way in which photographs are produced without human intervention
are simply false, because at least some human decisions are necessary parts of the
process of production of photographs (both digital and traditional). I shall now focus
on another type of such decisions, which will make salient another important and
essential feature of the nature of photographs.
§2. The kind of intentional decisions we have seen until now included only deci-
sions that take place at ‘later’ stages of the process of production—that is, after the
shutter has been pressed. But there are crucial decisions that a photographer has to
2Williamson (1994) contains probably the most famous and influential epistemicist account. My
own version of an epistemicist view is to be found in Benovsky (2011b).
4.4 The Process of Production and Necessary Decisions 53
take before pressing the shutter as well, including at least aperture, shutter speed,
and focal length, but typically also framing (composition), focus, white balance, and
other. All of these, or at the very least the first three, are decisions which have to
be taken, since no photograph can be made without specifying these settings. As
before, they can be taken either by the photographer herself, or—in the case of an
automatic camera—by somebody else who programmed the camera’s built-in soft-
ware (which happens even in the peculiar case where a camera unintentionally “takes
a photograph” itself when, say, it falls on the floor and the shutter is thus accidentally
pressed—I shall not focus on this type of cases in what follows, but at least in the case
of digital cameras, decisions taken by the programmers do play here their role in the
same way they do when a Sunday snapshooter takes a picture in the camera’s auto-
matic mode). Now, an important feature of this type of decision I want to emphasize
is that they appeal to tools that a skilled photographer can use to guide and direct
the attention of the spectator of her photograph, in order to convey a message, a
thought, an idea. Elsewhere,3I discuss this way the photographer interacts with her
audience in detail; here it will be sufficient to take one quick example to illustrate my
point. Consider aperture: all things being equal, the wider the aperture, the shallower
the depth of field. Thus decisions about the aperture setting will have an effect on
the depth of field which in turn will have an effect of what is sharp and what is
blurred on the resulting photograph. This is one of the central tools that a photog-
rapher has at her disposal to convey a message with her photograph—in short, by
making some elements on her picture to be sharper than their environment, she can
tell the spectators of her photograph: “Look here, this is what I wanted to show you,
this is important". What the photographer does here is that she exploits the natural
tendency of our perceptual system to be attracted by what is sharp rather than by what
is blurred, and she can thus ‘force’ the look of the spectator of her image to focus
on some elements of her photograph rather than on others—and use this technique
to ‘tell a story’ with her photograph, rather than ‘only’ depict the world in a sort of
‘documentary’ way. Here is an example of a mistake I once made that illustrates the
point: when climbing the Matterhorn with a mountain guide, he asked me when we
reached the summit to take a nice portrait photograph of him standing on the top, that
he wished to use for his Curriculum Vitae and his advertisement brochures. I took the
photograph using a telephoto lens (320 mm) at f/2.8 (wide aperture), which resulted
in a portrait of his face with a nicely blurred background—the kind of photograph
that valorises the person’s face, by making it stand out from its environment and by
attracting the attention of the spectator’s look to it (see the “attention management”
technique above), thus making it a central element of the kind of visual message the
photograph conveys. The mistake, of course, was that on such a type of photograph,
with such a shallow depth of field, one could not see in the resulting image that we
were at 4478 m above sea level on a famous summit in the Alps—the photograph
could have been taken more or less anywhere with the same result, it was not even
obvious that we were in the mountains at all! The choice of a wide aperture was thus
here totally inappropriate since it ‘masked’ the kind of message the photograph was
3Benovsky (2012).
54 4 Limits and Their Vagueness: The Case of Paintings and Photographs
supposed to convey, namely, a picture of a mountain guide high in the mountains on
a famous summit. Luckily, the guide immediately spotted the mistake and we were
able to correct it, by taking another photograph using a f/6.3 aperture (i.e. a wider
depth of field, resulting in a less blurred background). What this mistake and the
way it was corrected shows is how a photographer can convey one type of message
(“look, here is a beautiful face!”) rather than another (“look, here is a face of a person
in such-and-such an environment!”) using different aperture settings. Again, I have
over-simplified the whole chain of reasoning here (see Benovsky 2012 for a detailed
account) but it should be sufficient to appreciate the point(s) I want to make: as a
matter of necessity, there are human decisions that must be taken in order to produce
a photograph concerning at the very least aperture, shutter speed, and focal length;
these decisions allow the photographer to manipulate and manage the attention of
the spectator by exploiting our natural perceptual tendencies, which in turn allows
her to ‘tell a story’ with her photograph and to convey a message in a very clear (non-
metaphorical) sense. These decisions being necessary (since no photograph can be
made without taking them), not only we see here again that the claim about a ‘purely
mechanical’ way photographs are allegedly produced ‘without human intervention’
is false, but we also learn about another essential feature of photographs: they are
ways for the photographer to control the attention of the spectator and to convey a
message. In short, photographs not only have depictive powers but narrative powers
as well.
(In the case of a Sunday snapshooter, who does not take decisions about aperture
herself, she still takes crucial and story-telling decisions when she frames, composes,
and focuses her photograph in one way rather than another, namely at least the
decisions about the relative size and position of the main subject as compared to
its environment, thus again making it more salient and more important (or not—
depending on the kind of message she wishes to convey with her photograph)).
§3. Light Field cameras exhibit a technology which challenges deeply the way
photographers work, and which constitutes a fascinating borderline case of an image
which is such that it is unclear whether it is a photograph or not. (For an example of
images produced by a Light Field Camera (LFC) follow the link here: https://www.
jiribenovsky.org/thelimitsofart).
As you can see, for obvious reasons, it is not possible, as in the case of my other
examples reprinted above, to produce a print of a LFC-image since, contrary to all
types of photographs we are accustomed to, it is a ‘moving picture’—more precisely,
it is not a static image. Indeed, LFC-images are such that they can be refocused after
they have been taken; moreover, they can be refocused by the spectator of the image,
and not by the photographer.
All this, I submit, makes LFC-images not photographs at all. Let me elaborate.
We have seen in the preceding section how a photographer can use the tools at her
disposal to guide and control the look of the spectator of her photograph and convey
a message. With a LFC, this is not possible anymore: the resulting images are such
that it is not possible for the photographer to control what is sharp and what is blurred
on the photograph, it is not possible to control where the spectator will focus her
attention, and thus LFCs deprive the photographer of her best and strongest tool for
4.4 The Process of Production and Necessary Decisions 55
communicating with her audience—it deprives photographs of their narrative powers.
Thus, LFC-images lack one essential features photographs have. Photographs are
essentially static images, and since LFC-images are not, they must be something
else than photographs. But they are not like cinema either, interestingly, for the very
same reason: as Carroll (2008, chap. 5) has shown, the motion picture maker does a
job which is similar to the photographer’s in the sense that she controls and guides
the attention of the spectator of her movie, typically, by taking decisions about depth
of field, about the order in which one sees things, about for how long one sees them,
about the relative size (scale) of the main subject, and so on. Cinema thus shares
with photography this essential feature: they are both ways for an artist to ‘force’
her audience to perceive the world which is depicted in a way she wants to show it
(and this is how both cinema and photography have narrative powers). LFC-images
are very different in this respect, since they are dynamic ‘unsettled’ images which
are at least partly (but importantly!) under the control of the spectator, and not of the
artist. LFC-images are thus not photographs, they are not cinema, they are digital
sculptures. Indeed, the way the artist interacts here with her audience is very similar
to the way a sculptor does. When observing a sculpture, one can focus on different
parts of it in one’s own way, in one’s own order, and for as long as one wishes—a
sculpture, contrary to a photograph, does not ‘force’ one’s look to focus on some
parts of it rather than others. One can choose the angle from which one looks at a
sculpture. The way a spectator interacts with a sculpture thus gives rise to a dynamic
experience of it. LFC-images thus lie outside the vague boundaries of what counts
as a photograph and what does not.
4.5 Photographs, Paintings, Vagueness
§1. In the preceding sections, we have seen various ways in which the process of
production of photographs contains essential steps that characterize the nature of
photography—which can help us to decide what counts as a photograph and what
does not. Inter alia, I have offered reasons to reject the view that this process is such
that photographs are produced in a ‘purely mechanical’ way, by showing how human
intervention is an essential part of the process. But there is one very good motivation
behind the ‘mechanicist claim’, one which I think is important to preserve, in order
to have a good grasp on what counts as a photograph and what does not, namely,
the claim that a photograph is always a photograph of something that exists (which
makes it a different type of picture, in principle, than a painting). To my mind, this is
correct. But there is a threat of losing this claim, if one believes, as I do and as I have
argued above, that digital manipulation and digital retouches should be accepted
as parts of a normal process of production of photographs, and consequently that
sometimes even heavily retouched images should still count as photographs—there
is the risk that such a picture does not depict anything existing any more.
56 4 Limits and Their Vagueness: The Case of Paintings and Photographs
§2. There are two claims I made that can help to avoid this unwelcome result.
Firstly, and very importantly, while it is true that photographs depict always some-
thing existing, they always do so not in some sort of ‘ideally objective’ and purely
causal way but rather they show us the world in a way the photographer wants us to see
it. This, as we have seen, applies to photography in general, and not only to digitally
manipulated photographs; just think of all the types of necessary human interventions
that are part of the process of production of a photograph (necessary digital manipula-
tions, and the photographer’s necessary decisions). As a consequence, a photograph
depicts always that something exists, but not necessarily (never, actually) how it is. A
photograph that has been digitally manipulated can thus still count as a photograph,
and still be an image that depicts something that exists, while depicting it in a way
which is different from the way it is. (Again, this claim applies to photography in
general, and not only to the case of digital manipulation.)
Secondly, I have insisted on the inescapable vagueness of the limit between what
counts as a photograph and what does not. I have also insisted on the fact that we
cannot determine, once and for all, where this limit lies—such is its vague nature.
But the claim cherished by the friends of the mechanicist thesis, which I share, gives
us a little more grasp on the whereabouts of this limit: once the resulting image does
not depict anything existing anymore, it ceases to be a photograph. This criterion thus
gives us one way of specifying the ‘upper boundary’ of the fuzzy and vague zone
containing borderline cases of photographs. Thus, very heavily digitally retouched
photographs do not count; rather, they become digital paintings. The limit between
(digital) paintings and photographs is a vague one.
§3. In this Chapter, I tried to make some progress concerning the issue about
what counts as a photograph and what does not, with the purpose of finding some
essential features of photography in the process of doing so. Among the essential
features of photographs I raised the following: they always depict something that
exists, but not always how it is; both what we see in the resulting image and the way
the image was produced count in determining whether it is a photograph or not; the
process of production is not purely mechanical and causally closed, on the contrary,
it involves many steps where human decisions have to be taken; they are static images
which have ‘narrative powers’, that is, which the photographer can use to control and
guide the attention of the spectator; digital photographs are photographs, and digital
manipulation is perfectly acceptable as a part of a normal process of their production,
at least to some extent; importantly, the limit between what counts as a photograph
and what does not is irreducibly vague. Without discussing it here, I also quickly
mentioned Walton’s transparency claim which I think is correct (even if not always
for Walton’s reasons; see Benovsky 2011a). To be sure, the photograph has not yet
disclosed all its secrets, and, as future technologies will arrive and incessantly change
the ways it can be produced and manipulated, many new and interesting insights lie
ahead, modifying our understanding of what the limits between photographs and
(digital) paintings are.
References 57
References
Bazin A (1960) The ontology of the photographic image. transl. by Hugh Gray. Film Q 13:4
Benovsky J (2011a) Three kinds of realism about photographs. J Speculative Philos 25:4
Benovsky J (2011b) Vagueness: a statistical epistemicist approach. Teorema XXX/3
Benovsky J (2012) Photographic representation and depiction of temporal extension. Inquiry
55(2):194–213
Carroll N (2008) The philosophy of motion pictures. Blackwell Publishing, Malden
Hopkins R (2012) Factive pictorial experience: What’s special about photographs? Noûs 46(4):709–
731
Scruton R (1981) Photography and representation. Critical Inq 7:3
Walton KL (1984) On the nature of photographic realism. Crit Inq 11:2
Williamson T (1994) Vagueness. Routledge
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