Encyclopedia of Aesthetics. - book review

MICHAEL KELLY, ED.

Encyclopedia of Aesthetics. 4 vols.

New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. 2,208 pp.; 90 b/w ills. $495.00

Writing a review of a work on aesthetics for a journal read by art historians seems rather like extolling the merits of beef to a group of vegetarians. It is not a popular subject and on the face of it there seems to be no reason why it should be. Journals of aesthetics are not normally illustrated, and aestheticians seem to take no interest at all in particular works of art. Aesthetics is approached at a level of generality that would appal the typical art historian. Ernst Gombrich is on record as saying, "Frankly, I am ... somewhat uneasy when I am confronted with disquisitions about 'the artist' or 'the work of art' without being told whether I am expected to think of the Temple of Abu Simbel or a screenprint by Andy Warhol." Though he did go on to say, "Yet we historians of the arts would be lacking in gratitude if we ever forgot that our disciplines are in fact the offspring of aesthetics--whether or not the topic was known by that name or not." (1)

The crucial expression here is "whether or not the topic was known by that name or not." On the terms of this encyclopedia, art historians are implicitly aestheticians without being consciously aware of it. If we take aesthetics to refer to critical reflections on art, nature, and culture, including philosophical aesthetics, the field extends to include the theorists of the various arts, cultural theorists, and, implicitly, art historians.

It may be argued that art historians have some working concept of the aesthetic that informs their choice of subject matter and its description. Certainly there is a notion of descriptive relevance brought to hear on artists' procedures that implies some notion of what an artist was doing by painting a picture in one way rather than another. What were the Impressionists up to, for example? What are the implications of the vocabulary that one uses to describe their work? What sense does it make to speak of recording an impression as opposed to creating the effect of one? What was Raphael up to in painting the Stanze in the Vatican, what kinds of categories would be appropriate for describing the resulting images? It might be thought that answers to these questions could be given in a clear and unequivocal way. Perhaps they can. But answering those questions depends on recognizing their significance and being self-critical of the categories that one brings to bear. One of the essays that led to Erwin Panofsky's publication of Studies in Iconography was titled "Zum Problem der Beschreibung und Inhaltsdeutung von Werken der bildenden Kunst" (The problem of the description of works of art and the interpretation of their meaning). (2)

Panofsky's essay was part of a much wider German movement of critical self-understanding. From the other side of the Atlantic it seems that there is a similar movement afoot now, marked by such publications as Robert Nelson and Richard Shiff's Critical Terms for Art History and Mark Cheetham, Michael Ann Holly, and Keith Moxey's The Subjects of Art History. Christopher Wood's recent book The Vienna School Reader is potentially significant for contemporary art history in the same way that Frederic Jameson's Aesthetics and Politics was for literary theorists in the early 1980s.

It is interesting, though, that in the early 20th century significant questions of aesthetics were raised for art historians by art historians, not by professional philosophers. Of course, the art historians studied in philosophy faculties, and those who took philosophy courses must have absorbed some philosophy into their blood. Similar critical pressures could, though, come from elsewhere. Ernst Gombrich is a case in point. His tutor Julius von Schlosser was a close friend of Benedetto Croce and never ceased to extol the merit of the latter's views. Gombrich attended a course of lectures on the history of ethics given by Moritz Schlick, the leader of the famous Vienna Circle of philosophers. While Schlosser was an exemplar of the self-critical historian, it was Karl Buhler who offered a combination of semiotics and psychology that Gombrich would later take into Art and Illusion. Gombrich's essay "Wertprobleme und mittelalterliche Kunst" (kritische Berichte, 1937) was more indebted to psychology than to aest hetics. Gombrich had also developed a critical position toward historicism before he had ever met Karl Popper. His attraction to Popper's work was based on a congeniality toward his views.

The editor of the Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, Michael Kelly, writes in his preface that the work is intended to "revitalize the field" (vol. 1, p. xi). At first sight this might seem paradoxical. Surely a publication of a work this ambitious must mean that there is a ready and willing audience for it; Oxford University Press is highly sensitive to its potential market. In fact, given its girth, it would seem to signal the advent of a golden age of aesthetics. But notice that "the entries in the encyclopedia have been written by more than five hundred philosophers, art historians, literary theorists, psychologists, feminist theorists, legal theorists, sociologists, anthropologists, and others who reflect critically on art, culture, and nature" (vol. 1, p. xii). Philosophical aesthetics, as it is understood in philosophy departments, has a limited role to play in the encyclopedia. This is against the background of a subject increasingly dominated by philosophers in the aesthetics journals, particularly the Jour nal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism and British Journal of Aesthetics, aesthetics textbooks, and even Blackwell's Companion to Aesthetics. In the 1993 celebration issue of the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism twenty-four out of twenty-eight contributors were philosophers, and in the 2000 celebration volume of the British Journal of Aesthetics eleven of the twelve contributors were philosophers. Despite this drift to philosophy, there is still a strong audience for aesthetics in its most general and extended sense. The encyclopedia lays claim to the interest of that audience, and the degree to which it is reviewed in journals within that extended field should offer some criterion by which to judge its success.