Richard Wollheim

The Institutional theory of art

By the Institutional theory of art I mean a view which offers a definition of art: the definition it offers purports to be non-circular, or, at least, not viciously circular: and it defines art by reference to what is said or done by persons or bodies of persons whose roles are social facts. Not everyone, indeed not everyone who professes the Institutional theory, would agree even with this summary of it, so it must be taken as in part stipulative. In seeking to define art the Institutional theory offers more than just a method for picking out those things in the world which are or happen to be works of art. Indeed, whether it even offers such a method depends on whether the definition it provides can be used operationally, or is epistemically effective, but, if it is, then what is significant about the method is that it picks out works of art by those properties, and only those, which are essential to them. In this respect the Institutional theory is committed to an enterprise that is far more radical, also far more traditionalist, than, for instance, that which I consider in section 60 of the main text: and it is also just the enterprise that, over the past two decades or so, more sceptically inclined philosophers, often expressing an indebtedness to Wittgensteinian ideas, have declared not possible. The Institutional theory by proposing a definition of art promises a return to what it sees as mainstream aesthetics. However, if the theory is ambitious in aim, it affects, or tends to affect, a certain modesty of scope. Most adherents of the Institutional theory claim to distinguish more than one sense of the term ‘art’, and the definition they offer is intended only for the primary or ‘classificatory’ sense. Used in this sense, ‘art’ assigns the thing to which it is applied to a certain class or category. But Institutionalists discern also an ‘evaluative’ sense of the term and sometimes an ‘honorific’ or ‘courtesy’ sense. Used in the evaluative sense, ‘art’ rates the thing to which it is applied high up amongst members of this class or category.

Criticism as retrieval

It is a deficiency of at least the English language that there is no single word, applicable over all the arts, for the process of coming to understand a particular work of art. To make good this deficiency I shall appropriate the word ‘criticism’, but in doing so I know that, though this concurs with the way the word is normally used in connection with, say, literature, it violates usage in, at any rate, the domain of the visual arts, where ‘criticism’ is the name of a purely evaluative activity. The central question to be asked of criticism is, What does it do? How is a piece of criticism to be assessed, and what determines whether it is adequate? To my mind the best brief answer, of which this essay will offer an exposition and a limited defence, is, Criticism is retrieval . The task of criticism is 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. To the view advanced, that criticism is retrieval, several objections are raised. The first objection is that, by and large, this view makes criticism impossible: and this is so because, except in exceptional circumstances, it is beyond the bounds of practical possibility to reconstruct the creative process. Any argument to any such conclusion makes use of further premisses – either about the nature of knowledge and its limits, or about the nature of the mind and its inaccessibility – and the character of these further premisses comes out in the precise way the conclusion is formulated or how it is qualified. For, though an extreme form of the objection would be that the creative process can never be reconstructed, the conclusion is likelier to take some such form as that criticism is impossible unless the critic and the artist are one and the same person, or the work was created in the ambience of the critic, or the creative process was fully, unambiguously, and contemporaneously documented by the artist.

I—Richard Wollheim

Any experiential view of pictorial meaning will assign to each painting an appropriate experience through which its meaning can be recovered. When the meaning is representational, what is the nature of the appropriate experience? If there is agreement that the experience is to be described as seeing-in, disagreement breaks out about how seeing-in is to be understood. This paper challenges two recent interpretations: one in terms of perceived resemblance, the other in terms of imagining seeing. Neither view gives a correct account of how the spectator distributes his attention between the marked surface and the represented object.

Representation: The Philosophical Contribution to Psychology

It is now, I hope, accepted as the outmoded view that it is that philosophy and psychology are totally independent disciplines. It seems to me that there are many philosophical questions that cannot be answered unless we know the relevant psychology, and there are many psychological questions answers to which await upon the relevant philosophy. I think that one of the many reasons why the topic of representation is so interesting is that it illustrates extremely well the interdependence of the two subjects. I shall be content if, in this paper which is necessarily schematic, I can make this view seem worth taking seriously.

Desire, Belief, and Professor Grünbaum’s Freud

Virtually all those who are not either ignorant of Freud or totally sceptical of his findings believe that he altered, radically altered, our conception of the mind. He effected a change in what we think we are like, and it was a big change. Astonishingly enough, it is philosophers who have been of all people the slowest to recognize this fact. They have been slowest to recognize that this fact has anything to do with them.

Art and Its Objects

1 ‘What is art?’ ‘Art is the sum or totality of works of art.’ ‘What is a work of art?’ ‘A work of art is a poem, a painting, a piece of music, a sculpture, a novel. …’ ‘What is a poem? a painting? a piece of music? a sculpture? a novel? …’ ‘A poem is …, a painting is …, a piece of music is …’ a sculpture is …‘ a novel is …’ It would be natural to assume that, if only we could fill in the gaps in the last line of this dialogue, we should have an answer to one of the most elusive of the traditional problems of human culture: the nature of art. The assumption here is, of course, that the dialogue, as we have it above, is consequential. This is something that, for the present, I shall continue to assume. 2 It might, however, be objected that, even if we could succeed in filling in the gaps on which this dialogue ends, we should still not have an answer to the traditional question, at any rate as this has been traditionally intended. For that question has always been a demand for a unitary answer, an answer of the form ‘Art is …’; whereas the best we could now hope for is a plurality of answers, as many indeed as the arts or media that we initially distinguish. And if it is now countered that we could always get a unitary answer out of what we would then have, by putting together all the particular answers into one big disjunction, this misses the point. For the traditional demand was certainly, if not always explicitly, intended to exclude anything by way of an answer that had this degree of complexity: precisely the use of the word ‘unitary’ is to show that what is not wanted is anything of the form ‘Art is (whatever a poem is), or (whatever a painting is), or …’ But why should it be assumed, as it now appears to be, that, if we think of Art as being essentially explicable in terms of different kinds of work of art or different arts, we must abandon hope of anything except a highly complex conception of Art?