Philosophy and the Arts, Lecture 19:

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Philosophy and the Arts,Lecture 19

• Art as Language-I

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Can Art be a Language??

• Suppose you are making final plans to graduate,
  so you make a visit to the AS office to have
  your credits checked.
• Did you take a foreign language?
• Got that one covered.
• What? French, German, Spanish?
• No, I took Art.
• Let me tell you that wont work.

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Abstract Expressionism

• Some years ago, a Baylor art historian suggested
  we often fail to understand works of this sort
  because we dont understand the language, and he
  compared this to not understanding Greek.
• Wouldnt it sound just a bit odd to speak of
  translating the Mona Lisa into German??

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So maybe art isnt a language...

• Joseph Margolis has argued that art meets none of
  the criteria required for a language.
• Arthur Danto says art has to be meaningful, but I
  think he would agree that art is not a language,
  on all fours with French, Spanish, English, or
  whatever.
• Probably the best work yet done on this general
  subject was by E. H. Gombrich, in his Art and
  Illusion.

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Why did they do that??

• Early on, Gombrich presents us a question, why
  did the Egyptians draw things as they did?
• The answer suggested by this cartoon is that
  there were a few people walking around that
  looked like that (thats a joke, son).
• Gombrich begins to answer by saying there is no
  innocent eye.

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How about Constable??
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Check another
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Or this
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Or this.
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Or even this
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Not really

• Constable was one of Gombrichs favorite
  painters, and one of mine.
• His works look so natural, so realistic. Surely,
  he painted things as they really are.
• But Gombrich took photos of the scenes Constable
  had painted, and found this was not the case. He
  found significant differences.
• Again, no innocent eye. Vision is always
  selective.

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Consider another example
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Why did Durer do that??

• The point is not just that Durer had never seen a
  rhino before.
• This example supports Gombrichs case that art,
  like language, develops conventions. Just as we
  learn to use words such as desk and chair to
  stand for this and this, so we learn to accept
  certain lines and shapes as representing the
  human figure.
• But, in Durers circle, there was no recognized
  schema for a rhino.

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Stubbs and his horses

• I think Stubbs taught us how to see, and how to
  draw, horses.
• Nobody before or since did it better.

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Not before the 20th Century
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What??

• To take the picture on the previous slide
  (Edinburgh Castle), I climbed up the Sir Walter
  Scott monument (I was younger then). And I got it
  all in by using a wide-angle lens, not available
  in the 19th century. The same is true of the
  slide before it.
• This shows that not even a camera is an innocent
  eye.
• So is art a language? No. But it has one feature
  in common with language, that it must, and it
  does, employ conventions.

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Close with 2 stupid old man jokes.

• Remember the little girl who said Pigs are
  rightly named, because they are such filthy
  animals.
• Or recall the preacher who said Adam and Eve were
  super-intelligent, because Adam named the
  animals, and got every one right!