Art and Intention

Do the artist's intentions have anything to do with the making and appreciation of works of art? In Art and Intention Paisley Livingston develops a broad and balanced perspective on perennial disputes between intentionalists and anti-intentionalists in philosophical aesthetics and critical theory. He surveys and assesses a wide range of rival assumptions about the nature of intentions and the status of intentionalist psychology. With detailed reference toexamples from diverse media, art forms, and traditions, he demonstrates that insights into the multiple functions of intentions have important implications for our understanding of artistic creation and authorship, the ontology of art, conceptions of texts, works, and versions, basic issues pertaining to thenature of fiction and fictional truth, and the theory of art interpretation and appreciation. Livingston argues that neither the inspirationist nor rationalistic conceptions can capture the blending of deliberate and intentional, spontaneous and unintentional processes in the creation of art. Texts, works, and artistic structures and performances cannot be adequately individuated in the absence of a recognition of the relevant makers´ intentions. The distinction between complete and incomplete works receives an action-theoretic analysis that makes possible an elucidation ofseveral different senses of 'fragment' in critical discourse. Livingston develops an account of authorship, contending that the recognition of intentions is in fact crucial to our understanding of diverse forms of collective art-making. An artist's short-term intentions and long-term plans and policiesinteract in complex ways in the emergence of an artistic oeuvre, and our uptake of such attitudes makes an important difference to our appreciation of the relations between items belonging to a single life-work.The intentionalism Livingston advocates is, however, a partial one, and accomodates a number of important anti-intentionalist contentions. Intentions are fallible, and works of art, like other artefacts, can be put to a bewildering diversity of uses. Yet some important aspects of art´s meaning and value are linked to the artist´s aims and activities.

Richly informed, crisply written, and thoughtfully argued, Art and Intention makes a strong case for the role that intentions play and ought to be considered to play in producing and appreciating works of art. Intentions, in the author's highly plausibly understanding of them, are not always conscious or successfully realized; nor does he think that we can expect to appreciate a work's meanings in every case simply by understanding the artist's intentions. But there are also ample reasons for thinking that we will often fail to understand the individual or collective production of a work of art, its difference from texts and relation to other works in a single oeuvre, a proper interpretation of it, and, in some cases, its fictional status if we fail to pay attention to the relevant intentions. Livingston elegantly marshals these reasons in what is bound to be a major resource for philosophical thinking on the subject of intentions in art.