Understanding of Art
Art engages the understanding in many ways. Thus, confronted with an allegorical painting such as Van Eyk’s The Marriage of Arnolfini, one might want to understand the significance of the objects it depicts. Similarly, confronted with an obscure poem, such as Eliot’s The Waste Land, one might seek to understand what it means. Sometimes, too, we claim not to understand a work of art, a piece of music, say, when we are unable to derive enjoyment from it because we cannot see how it is organized or hangs together. Sometimes what challenges the understanding goes deeper, as when we ask why some things, including such notorious productions of the avant garde as the urinal exhibited by Marcel Duchamp, are called art at all. Some have also claimed that to understand a work of art we must understand its context. Sometimes the context referred to is that of the particular problems and aims of the individual artist in a certain tradition, as when the church of St Martin-in-the-Fields is understood as a contribution by its architect to the vexing problem of combining a tower with a classical façade. Sometimes the context is social, as when some Marxists argue that works of art can best be understood as reflections of the more or less inadequate economic organizations of the societies that gave rise to them. The understanding of art becomes a philosophical problem because, first, it is sometimes thought that one of the central tasks of interpretation is to understand the meaning of a work. However, recent writers, notably Derrida (1972), query the notion of the meaning of a work as something to be definitively deciphered, and offer the alternative view of interpretation as an unending play with the infinitely varied meanings of the text. Second, a controversial issue has been the extent to which the judgment of works of art can be divorced from an understanding of the circumstances, both individual and cultural, of their making. Thus Clive Bell argued that to appreciate a work of art we need nothing more than a knowledge of its colours, shapes and spatial arrangements. Others, ranging from Wittgenstein to Marxists, have for a variety of different reasons argued that a work of art cannot be properly understood and appreciated without some understanding of its relation to the context of its creation, a view famously characterized by Beardsley and Wimsatt (1954) as the ‘genetic fallacy’.
1 Minimal understanding
Some, notably Clive Bell (1914), have argued that in order to appreciate a work of art we need a very minimal understanding of it. We do not need to understand what, say, an allegorical picture represents, or when, how and why it was painted. All we need is knowledge of its form as revealed in its colours, shapes and spatial arrangements. Apart from the unfortunate way in which this encourages appreciators to treat representations of suffering, grief and loss as exercises in aesthetic pleasure-seeking, and apart from the cavalier dismissal of the delight that we take in representation and expression, this theory fails even as an account of the appreciation of form. Sometimes it is only when we understand what is depicted that we can appreciate the formal composition of a work. In Stubbs’s painting The Duke of Richmond’s Racehorses at Exercise, it is only because we recognize a pointing hand leading our eyes in a certain direction that we understand the composition of the painting.
Wollheim (1980) has argued that the very possibility of representational painting entails a reference to the pictorial intentions of artists. Hence, granted that representation is a relevant concern to the appreciator of art, understanding is, on Wollheim’s view, related to intention. For seeing a canvas as a representational painting differs from seeing, by an exercise of one’s fancy, pictures in a moss-covered wall; the difference, Wollheim claims, being a matter of there being a standard of correctness for representation. We correctly understand a representation when there is a match between what we impute to the canvas and what the artist intended to represent. Both to understand that something is a representation and to understand what it represents we need a reference to intentional activity.
2 Categories
Some, including Kendall Walton (1970), have argued that evaluation and understanding are related, since in order to make a proper evaluation of a work of art it is sometimes necessary to understand to which category of art it belongs, a view also argued by Richard Wollheim, and vehemently denied by Croce in his attack on the notion of artistic genres. This view has some affinity with a discussion in moral philosophy initiated by Peter Geach in his distinction between predicative and attributive terms (1956). Consider the difference between ‘grey’ (predicative) and ‘big’ (attributive). ‘This is a grey mouse’ divides with no oddity into ‘This is grey’ and ‘This is a mouse’. This being so, we could know that a thing is grey without knowing to what category it belongs. But ‘This is a big mouse’ does not appear so easily to divide into ‘This is big’ and ‘This is a mouse’. The truth of assertions about bigness (unlike those for greyness) seems to be related to different standards of normal size for different categories of things. Similarly some have argued that judgments of merit in aesthetics are relative to categories. What is beautiful as the neck of a horse might not be beautiful as the neck of a Vice Chancellor, and the excellences of sonnets are not those of haiku. A clear case of a need to know the category of a work is the case in which we need to know that a work is ironic or a parody in order to appreciate it properly.
It is not, however, entirely clear that critical as opposed to classificatory judgments of works of art do require understanding of categories. It is legitimate to ask whether what is a good sonnet in the sense in which it meets the requirements of membership of that category is also a good literary work of art – a question that seems to invoke non-specific categories of appraisal in use across the arts.
3 Evaluation and explanation
Many have argued that it is one thing to evaluate a work of art and another to seek an understanding or explanation of its genesis. Beardsley and Wimsatt (1954), for example, claimed that understanding a poem as a prelude to critically appraising it requires only such knowledge of the public language as could be obtained from dictionaries or from any competent speaker. It does not require knowledge of the intentions of the poet to mean something, for the words of the poem belong not to the poet but to the language. This does not rule out historical studies. In the case of a work of some antiquity, as the critical apparatus of most Shakespeare plays will demonstrate, in order to secure understanding we might have to do considerable research to find out what the public meanings of the words were at the time of publication. According to Beardsley and Wimsatt, this does not license biographical enquiries, however, since what we are interested in are the public words of a public text, not the private meanings of an author.
To investigate the genesis of the work would indeed be to understand more about it and how it came to be as it is, but this, Beardsley and Wimsatt claim, would not be relevant or necessary to its assessment. A similar line was taken by Trotsky, who argued that a work of art is to be judged by its own laws (1924). That done, a Marxist could explain, as Marxists can for any human product, valuable or not, how that artistic product had ultimately arisen from a certain economic sub-structure of a society (see Marx, K.). The understanding of the work that this would yield would not, however, be relevant to judgments of artistic merit. In the next two sections we shall look more closely at such attempts to separate understanding and evaluation.
4 Understanding, truth and morality
Much of the debate about art and understanding is a debate about how much of what might rightly be called an understanding of art is relevant to questions of the evaluation of art. Bell, for example, would not have denied that it is a fact about Frith’s Victorian narrative painting Paddington Station that it is a representational painting. To understand that is to understand something about the painting. What Bell would have denied was that this understanding had anything to do with the appreciation or value of the work. Bell’s denial of the relevance of an understanding of the representational aspects of a painting, however, seems merely by fiat to eliminate aspects of paintings which people unhesitatingly enjoy and which, as Wollheim and others have argued, are highly relevant to aesthetic effects.
We may take as a more promising example of the debates about the relevance of certain sorts of understanding the vigorously controversial issue of the relevance to evaluation of an understanding of the truth and morality of a work of art. Some, including Wilde, have denied that works of art can be true or moral at all. But among those who concede that a work of art might contain truths (as Kafka is said sometimes to have captured a truth about the human condition) and might articulate a moral stance (as Jane Austen is often said to do) there are those who deny that an understanding that a work truly has these aspects has any bearing on its evaluation. As to morality, there is a perfectly good sense in which anyone who missed the fact that a certain moral outlook pervades a novel by Jane Austen has not understood that novel. The question is whether that understanding is involved in the assessment of the work, a question to which F.R. Leavis categorically gave an affirmative answer and to which Croce gave an equally categorical negative reply (see Art and morality §3).
When we come to relevance of an understanding that a work of art articulates a view of life, including a view that can be characterized as morally correct, matters are initially muddier because of the complexities involved in assessing views of life. (How is pessimism to be weighed against optimism? Fielding against Kafka? Jane Austen against Sartre?)
One very important approach, adopted by certain Marxists, relates understanding the point of view of a work intrinsically to its evaluation. Suppose we allow that a work of art can articulate a view of life, and that to understand that work is, in part at least, to understand the view of life that it articulates. But, on one reading, Marxist theory claims to possess a privileged understanding of the objective laws of historical progress. In terms of those laws it is possible for a Marxist to say that such and such a state of society is a defective stage of human organization, to be surpassed in the forward march of history, and, further, to say that anyone endorsing that state of society shows a defective understanding of history. Then the way is open for a Marxist to say that a worldview articulated in a work of art can display a defective understanding of social relations (as some alleged was the case with Dickens’s Hard Times). It would seem narrowly prescriptive to say, without further argument, that this judgment is irrelevant to an assessment of a work of art. For it attributes to a work a lack of understanding, perceptiveness, and possibly imagination. It certainly treats it as the expression of an inadequate state of social consciousness. But then, it seems that there is at least one account that links understanding a work of art with its evaluative judgment. For to understand the work of art is to understand it as the articulation of a worldview, and to understand that aspect is to open the possibility of assessing the work in terms of the adequacy of the worldview it articulates as well as the adequacy of its articulation of it.
Whether such an account can ever be made to work depends on the truth of the Marxist claim – vigorously contested – that they have a privileged access to the objective laws of history. Even if such a claim were false, it should not be forgotten that part of our understanding of a work may involve an understanding of the view of life articulated in it, and, further, that our reaction to a work is often very much bound up with our feelings, not merely about the quality of the way in which that view is expressed, but also about the view itself (see Art and truth §4). Hence Wittgenstein’s frequent comment that he could not understand and engage with some works of art, for example the music of Mahler, as opposed to the works of Brahms, because he could not see the world from that viewpoint (1966).
5 Criticism as retrieval
Many have spoken as if the central task of all our dealings with art is evaluation, and other activities, such as the understanding of the whole context of a work, are irrelevant to criticism and appreciation. The element of truth in this is that we tend to embark upon enquiries into genesis and context after we have made the decision that the work is worth it. We study the origins of The Waste Land because, prior to any such study, we found The Waste Land rewarding. However, we cannot conclude from the fact that we are prompted to learn more about the circumstances of a work after it has impressed us favourably that information discovered about it subsequently is irrelevant to our assessment. Things that emerge on further enquiry might produce radical alterations in assessments (as when we discover that we were taken in by the excellence of a parody).
Second, on reading a work, we may find things in it that puzzle us. Beardsley and others are right that it is a fact about some works that they are puzzling. It is possible, however, not merely to settle for the knowledge that a work is puzzling. That leaves a gap in our understanding which we can plug by seeking reasons for why the work is as it is. The positioning of the figures in Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon will not change when we examine its very many drafts and sketches. But puzzlement as to why they are as they are will be replaced by a better understanding.
Finally, it is too easy to talk as if evaluation in some narrow sense were all there is to the appreciation of art. There is also such a thing as a love of a work of art, which, as is often the case with love, wishes to know all there is to know about the object of love and ultimately to understand it as fully as possible. To the lover of the work nothing about it is ultimately irrelevant. And this is related to the view that Richard Wollheim has defended of criticism as ‘retrieval’, where that involves:
the reconstruction of the creative process, where the creative process must in turn be thought of as something not stopping short of, but terminating on, the work of art itself. The creative process reconstructed, or retrieval complete, the work is then open to understanding.
Understanding and appreciation cannot be divorced, if for no other reason than that to understand a work of art may just be to hear, read or look at it with a certain kind of appreciative enjoyment. As Wittgenstein remarks, understanding that a Brahms rhythm has a certain queer quality is inseparable from experiencing that quality in it (1966: 20).
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