tailieunhanh - EVALUATIVE STANDARDS IN ART CRITICISM: A DEFENCE

The laser has a range of pulse widths from 5 to 100 milliseconds, which is longer than the thermal relaxation time of the epidermis and comparable to that of the follicle. This pulse width range can effectively damage the follicle. However, the epidermis also contains some melanin and must be protected. A sapphire window (ChillTip) with high thermal conductivity is put in direct contact with the skin. It cools the epidermis before, during, and after each laser pulse. Because of index matching, it also reduces internal reflection of back-scattered light. These combined thermal and optical cooling effects protect the epidermis from damage | Postgraduate Journal of Aesthetics Vol. 2 No. 1 April 2005 Evaluative Standards in Art Criticism a Defence Julia Peters university College London To a superficial consideration art criticism might appear as a profession of a parasitic nature nourishing itself on what is produced by others by artists. In fact however the relation between artistic practice and its criticism is more adequately conceived of as a sort of symbiosis. For while it is true that criticism depends on and presupposes the existence of its objects - that is works of art - on the other hand nothing would prevent good art from being equated with and contaminated by bad art if critics ceased to draw a distinction between the two. Criticsjudge and evaluate works of art. Moreover we expect critics to provide us with guidelines for engaging in criticism ourselves and thus to give us general critical standards. According to these presuppositions what would be a critical argument s premises if the critical procedure is compressed into the schematised formula of an argument to the conclusion that a present artwork is either good or bad It seems that cne premise must cite a quality or a number of qualities of the work in virtue of which the critic ascribes a value to it. For the argument to be complete the second premise must posit a general standard to the effect that works of art exhibiting the qualities cited in the first premise are correspondingly good or bad or at least that these qualities contribute to or diminish the work s The schematised argument provides what we expect from a critical judgment an evaluative standard as a general guideline for evaluating works of art and a demonstration of its application to an individual work. 1 This schema of critical arguments corresponds to both . Beardsley s and a. Isenberg s reconstructions. See Beardsley 456ff. Isenberg 131ff. 32 Julia Peters However the idea I have so far treated as a natural assumption and elaborated into a sketch of the .