Modern Art Theories

Abstract

The ancient doctrine that artworks are imitative or capture likenesses has been widely denied, and by aestheticians who are thought to hold sharply contrasting views about the nature of art. Two of these views are of particular interest to me. The first is formalism, or one of the views that can be called formalism, which maintains that artworks qua artworks are void of all representational content and consist in mere patterns of line and color that please us on a direct inspection. The second (and currently much more discussed) view is that artworks differ from mere physical objects by virtue of an invisible art-making property, namely, an identification that an artist makes whereby a physical object acquires a representational content. For the sake of terminological symmetry, and to distinguish it from other positions, I shall call this second view invisibilism-which should not be taken to suggest that artworks themselves are invisible, but only that the art-making property cannot be discerned in the visible physical object. If we think about the overall history of art, formalism and invisibilism look counterintuitive. But these views were motivated by developments in modern art, and these views can look more promising against that background. They are modern art theories, to use a term that is calculatedly ambiguous between theories of modem art and modern theories of art. I want to sort this ambiguity out, to understand the philosophical impact that modern art should have on our thinking, and to argue that insofar as the case against the ancient doctrine relies on historical premises the case is far from conclusive. We shall also see that formalism and invisibilism have more in common than we might have supposed. Depending on one's perspective, their common ground can be good news for one theory, bad news for the other, or-as I think most likely-bad news for both.