Aesthetic Function of Art

How can we understand art and its impact? Gary Iseminger argues that the function of the practice of art and the informal institution of the artworld is to promote aesthetic communication. He concludes that the fundamental criteria for evaluating a work of art as a work of art are aesthetic. After considering other practices and institutions that have aesthetic dimensions and other things that the practice of art does, Iseminger suggests that art is better at promoting aesthetic communication than other practices are and that art is better at promoting aesthetic communication than it is at anything else.Iseminger bases his work on a distinction often blurred in contemporary aesthetics, between art as a set of products"works of art"and art as an informal institution and social practice—the artworld. Focusing initially on the function of the artworld rather than the function of works of art, he blends elements from two of the most currently influential philosophical approaches to art, George Dickie's institutional theory and Monroe Beardsley's aesthetic theory, and provides a new foundation for a traditional account of what makes good art.

"Gary Iseminger's book is a precise, vigorous, and original defense of the intuitive but controversial claim that the distinctive value of art is rooted in the specifically aesthetic function of art. This book presents an exceptionally clear and careful account of the strengths and the objections to aestheticism as it has been conceived in the philosophical literature. Iseminger reorients traditional aestheticism toward the ways in which the practice of art and the informal institution of the artworld promote aesthetic communication. This is an important contribution to a debate that is at the heart of contemporary philosophical thinking about art.", "Philosophical theses never die: they just go to sleep for awhile. Gary Iseminger, in this eminently clear and rigorous book, has re-awakened the thesis that the function of art is aesthetic communication. Because of his spirited defense of aestheticism, we will all now have to seriously consider it yet again as a viable theory of art.", "This exceptionally lucid and compact book will make a forceful and timely contribution to the present scene in analytical aesthetics. Building on the widely discussed institutional theory of art of recent decades, Gary Iseminger develops an account of art in terms of the function that the art object performs, specifically that it affords aesthetic experience. Iseminger's New Aestheticism, as he terms it, builds on, but confidently and masterfully moves beyond, both institutionalism and aestheticism."

Gary Iseminger is Stephen R. Lewis, Jr. Professor of Philosophy and Liberal Learning, Emeritus, at Carleton College. He is the editor of Intention and Interpretation.