tailieunhanh - DICKIE’S INSTITUTIONAL THEORY AND THE “OPENNESS” OF THE CONCEPT OF ART

Probably the first commercial to make use of the newly invented principle of abstract composition was Walther Ruttmann’s ‘Der Sieger’, produced by Julius Pinschewer in 1922 for Excelsior tyres, where he adopted many ideas and motifs already present in his 1921 abstract work Opus 1. ‘Der Sieger’ was shot in black and white, coloured by combining toning with hand-colouring (cf Brinckmann, 1997: 263). Oskar Fischinger’s ‘Kreise’, produced in 1933 for TOLIRAG (Ton- und Lichtspiel-Reklame AG) in colour on Gasparcolor, showed a series of mov- ing circles perfectly synchronised with music composed by Richard Wagner and Edvard Grieg, the circles. | Postgraduate Journal of Aesthetics Vol. 3 No. 3 December 2006 Dickie s Institutional Theory and the openness of the concept OF art Alexandre Erler Lincoln College Oxford In this paper I will look at the relationship between Weitz s claim that art is an open concept and Dickie s institutional theory of art in its most recent form. Dickie s theory has been extensively discussed and often criticized in the literature on aesthetics yet it has rarely been observed - to my knowledge at least - that the fact that his theory actually incorporates at least to some extent Weitz s claim about the openness of the concept of art precisely accounts for what i take to be the main flaws in the theory. in what follows i present arguments for that claim looking briefly at the position of both authors with respect to the concept of art then showing how they relate to each other and what implications this has for Dickie s institutional theory and more generally for the traditional project of characterising art. Let me begin with a brief reminder of Weitz s argument against definitions of art as it appears in his famous essay The Role of Theory in Aesthetics Weitz 1956 . It is a well-known fact that a great number of philosophers since the time of Plato up to our own day have attempted to give a correct enunciation of the nature of art. They have notably maintained that art consists for example in significant form Bell and Fry s Formalism or in the communication of emotion through some sensuous public medium Emotionalism or in the clarification and externalization of a certain kind of intuition Croce s and Collingwood s intuitionism to give but a few examples. Yet Weitz thought that such attempts at capturing the nature of art were all fundamentally flawed. First of all it seems that one can always find a counterexample to any such proposed definition of art. But furthermore Weitz said such definitions simply cannot but fail to achieve their aim because of the very nature of the .