Davies FunctionalProceduralDefinitions 1990
Davies FunctionalProceduralDefinitions 1990
Davies FunctionalProceduralDefinitions 1990
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms
University of Illinois Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access
to The Journal of Aesthetic Education
STEPHEN DAVIES
pieces are held undoubtedly to be artworks where they have been created
in accordance with the "rules" used to confer art status (at a time and under
conditions where those rules can so be employed). But, this view continues,
to the extent that such works undermine the very point of art they do call to
account the usefulness of that general classification. The status of such
works as art is dubious only in the sense that they call into question the
status of all art by pursuing a use of the conventions of art creation which is
at odds with the point of art. According to this account, we might regard
the activities of such avant-garde artists as counterproductive in that their
activities undermine the status of art in general, although the status (as in-
stances of art in general) of the artworks they produce is not in doubt.
Whereas, according to the view by which art is a concept to be defined
functionally, pieces such as these are controversial in their claim to be
artworks. On this view, works which seem to undermine the point of art
could not automatically qualify as art. What is controversial is their claim to
art status, rather than the way in which they reflect generally on the clas-
sification of pieces as art. Such pieces, at best, have not validated their claim
to art status. So the frequently asked question "... but is it art?" is not to be
parsed as a question about the merits as art of the piece, but is to be under-
stood literally as asking if the piece qualifies for elevation to the status of art
at all.
point of art) will not qualify as art. A piece which does attain that threshold
will qualify as art, but if it does not exceed that threshold it will be bad art
relative to those artworks which do exceed the threshold.
posed by modern art to the person genuinely interested in art and its ap-
preciation. But Tilghman sees the issue this way only because he begs the
question against the proceduralist in thinking that a thing achieves art
status only by its engaging with the point of art, whereas in fact a proce-
duralist on art's definition is not someone who crudely sees no problem in
approaching difficult cases as artworks. Rather, the proceduralist differs
from the functionalist on art's definition in suggesting that the problem
does not follow from, or correspond to, a difficulty about the status of the
item as an artwork.
against his institutional definition of art. They have attacked his theory for
its failure to reveal the point of art;7 for its identifying as artworks pieces
which are controversial in that they challenge the very point of art;8 and for
its assumption that a descriptive as opposed to an evaluative definition is
possible.9 Of course, if one rejects, as does the proceduralist, the
functionalist assumptions on which these objections are based, then none of
these claims could be construed as a criticism.
A final comment: the two sides' arguments miss each other in the way I
have indicated because neither makes explicit why it holds that art must be
defined the one way as opposed to the other-functionally or procedurally.
The fundamental disagreement rarely is aired, so that in practice the debate
starts not from common ground, but from assumptions which the other
side regards already as questionable. Under such circumstances one might
frustratedly conclude that these differing points of view are incommen-
surable and that there is no wider perspective from which we might judge
between them; or one might fall into line with Weitzian antiessentialists
who dismiss as irrelevant and misguided any search for a definition of art.
Nevertheless, my own view is that, deep and basic though the disagree-
ment might be, it is a disagreement on which fruitfully critical discussion is
possible. I believe that we might determine by argument which of the func-
tional and procedural approaches to art's definition more correctly captures
the concept's core. This, though, is not the place to embark upon so grand a
project!
NOTES