Book Reviews
wilson, george m. Seeing Fictions in Film: The Episte-
mology of Movies. Oxford University Press, 2011,
viii + 220 pp., $45.00 cloth.
There is no doubt that this is a difficult book. The
question is whether Seeing Fictions in Film has to be
so difficult and whether working through its argu-
ments is worth the reader’s effort. Happily, the an-
swer to these questions is a definitive yes. In its com-
plexity and subtlety, the book reveals just what is at
stake in the recent debate about cinematic narration.
The reader is informed of all the points of confusion
and misdirection in this debate. She is then asked
to focus on what is really important and consider
a controversial but richly suggestive view about the
imaginative grounds and distinctive means of cine-
matic narration. Many of the components of this view
are familiar from Wilson’s earlier work, particularly
from a series of fascinating articles appearing be-
tween 1997 and 2007. But the book-length treatment
serves to reveal the continuity of Wilson’s thinking
while providing greater stress, elaboration, context,
and new responses to recent objections.
The central thesis of Seeing Fictions in Film can
be summed up as follows. In fiction film, the stan-
dard function of the image track is to prescribe what
viewers imagine seeing in the fiction. In performing
this function, the image track constitutes a (fictional)
narration of the story, a kind of visual narration dis-
tinctive to cinema (pp. 9–10). There are, of course,
as Wilson regularly acknowledges, a parallel set of
claims to be made about the sound track in fiction
films. But his focus is on defending the claim that
“imagined seeing” is the “primitive basis” for cine-
matic narration. The first seeds of the defense are
planted in the book’s introduction, and, in the next
seven chapters, we follow its complicated and fecund
growth. Chapters 8 and 9 are then devoted to film in-
terpretation. In Chapter 8, Wilson considers the last
three films that Josef von Sternberg made with Mar-
lene Dietrich. Through close structural and thematic
analysis, Wilson demonstrates how the films play con-
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 70:4 Fall 2012

c 2012 The American Society for Aesthetics
stantly with the narrational and dramatic devices of
Hollywood melodrama in order to highlight the na-
ture of the genre itself. In Chapter 9, Wilson argues
that the Coen brothers’ film The Man Who Wasn’t
There (2001) modulates the objectivity of its narra-
tion according to the shifts in the protagonist’s rela-
tion to others. Even though these final chapters do
not explicitly address imagined seeing and the status
of narration, they demonstrate that close interpreta-
tive work is essential to understanding how movies
tell stories.
Returning to the book’s central thesis, the Imag-
ined Seeing Thesis’s (IST) precise specification is
crucial in the face of preexisting skepticism about
the role of imagined seeing in fiction film engage-
ment. First, Wilson rejects the “face-to-face” version
of IST, the version on which “viewers imagine see-
ing segments of the fictional world from a position
face-to-face with the segments in question,” on the
grounds that we are never or rarely meant to imag-
ine being at a vantage point inside a fiction (p. 78).
The question is then whether we can make sense of
imagining seeing from an “unoccupied perspective.”
Wilson thinks that we can: on the “mediated version”
of IST, we imagine seeing depicted fictional events
indirectly, through “transparently derived” images,
and so without being involved in or even present at
fictional events. Of course, for the mediated version
of IST to be a version of IST at all requires accep-
tance of the controversial thesis, famously defended
by Kendall Walton, that certain kinds of images are
transparent such that we can see through them. Just
as controversial is Wilson’s further commitment to
the indeterminacy of our means of access to the vi-
sual narration: we are not meant to imagine anything
about how we came to be viewing a transparent visual
record of fictional events.
Wilson’s appeal to fictional indeterminacy in re-
sponse to worries about the absurd implications of
imagined seeing is familiar from some of his earlier
work. As before, in Seeing Fictions in Film the appeal
rests on a comparison between literary and cinematic
394
narration: just as it remains fictionally indeterminate
how we came to be reading Lemuel Gulliver’s travel
log, so it remains fictionally indeterminate how we
came to be seeing Charles Foster Kane alone on
his deathbed. Once the general plausibility of nar-
rational indeterminacy in fiction film has been estab-
lished, the book introduces a new analogy. This one is
between radio plays and fiction films, and it is used to
support the further claim that, in the case of movies,
indeterminacy sets in specifically between imagined
seeing and imagining being at a vantage point inside
the fiction (pp. 82–84). The new argument turns on
the claim that, in response to radio plays, we imagine
hearing fictional sounds in rough spatial relation to
one another, but without imagining being in the space
of those sounds. Wilson carefully and colorfully elab-
orates this claim to bring out its intuitiveness. Unfor-
tunately, however, its implications for the cinematic
case remain unclear: important differences between
movies and radio plays may make an imagined van-
tage point more likely in the former case than in
the latter. For instance, it is unclear whether Wilson
has the means to explain an important difference in
our movie experience between seeing the contents
of a shot with a fixed frame and seeing the contents
of a shot with a moving frame. The most straight-
forward explanation of the experienced difference
would surely appeal to whether we are prescribed to
imagine seeing from a fixed or from a moving van-
tage point. But to explain this difference, it seems
difficult to avoid appealing to a prescription to imag-
ine something about our vantage point.
Clearly, more needs to be said about the precise
role of fictional indeterminacy in our imaginative
experience of a film’s visual narration. But Wilson
would be the first to admit as much: throughout See-
ing Fictions in Film, he makes clear that his aim is to
show that the right version of IST can stand up against
the initial charges of absurdity and confusion. Once
IST has been given a fighting chance, we can con-
sider its explanatory power. And only then is it even
worth considering the issue that has tended to dom-
inate the current debate, that is, whether narrative
fiction films have implicit visual narrators. Chapter
6 of Seeing Fictions in Film takes up this issue, but
not in the usual way. Early on in the chapter, Wilson
renders trivial the question of the ubiquity of implicit
visual narrators in light of a commitment to films hav-
ing, as part of their fictions, a visual narration, or a
fictional showing of depicted events. The so-called
Fictional Showing Hypothesis (FSH) falls out of IST
insofar as there is a “fairly simple and direct concep-
tual connection” between “seeing something” when
one’s attention is directed to it and “being shown”
the thing in one’s sight (p. 55). There is thus little
point worrying about the ubiquity of cinematic nar-
rators until one has given a defense (or repudiation)
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
of IST. Given his commitment to IST, Wilson’s inter-
est in narrators is limited to the question of whether
the style of narration in particular films engenders
something more than a “minimal” narrating agency.
Returning to the explanatory power of IST, Wilson
argues that the mediated version is positively recom-
mended over the face-to-face version by its allowing
us to mark the differences in our experience of the
diegetic and nondiegetic visual qualities of a movie
shot. In addition, two important differences between
kinds of epistemic access to a movie narrative need
explaining with IST: the difference between know-
ing something happens in a movie because we “see”
it happen versus knowing something happens in the
movie that is not shown, on the basis of reasonable
inference; and the difference between knowing that
what we “see” in the movie is really happening in the
story world versus only in the mind of a character, as
a dream or hallucination.
These phenomenal and epistemic differences are
richly illustrated and carefully specified by Wilson. If
we can make sense of the notion of mediated imag-
ined seeing, the case for its explanatory power is
compelling. But can we make sense of this notion?
Leaving aside the question of whether seeing can
ever be mediated, there is still a question of what
makes a certain kind of imaginative experience, had
in response to what we see, itself a kind of seeing.
Wilson describes the relevant sense of imagined see-
ing as an imaginative impression as if one is seeing
what is depicted in a fiction film, a kind of impression
distinct from hallucination, from mistaken visual im-
pressions of other kinds, and from inner visualization
(pp. 72–74). But the distinction between imagined
seeing and other kinds of nonveridical seeing is not
entirely clear. The sense in which we see a werewolf
in a movie is easily distinguishable from the sense in
which we deliberately conjure up a werewolf in the
mind’s eye. But it is not so easily distinguishable from
other forms of passive and unintended visualization,
like the kind potentially involved in amodal percep-
tion whereby we represent occluded parts of per-
ceived objects. Furthermore, there is a question about
the precise nature of the relation between veridical
seeing (our actually seeing a visual representation of
the werewolf) and imagined seeing.
This relation could simply be causal: imagined see-
ing is prompted by actually seeing a visual represen-
tation. But it could also be an intentional relation: we
imagine of our act of seeing the image that it is an act
of seeing what is in the image. The second possibility
is central to Walton’s influential account of pictorial
experience, and we have already felt Walton’s influ-
ence in Seeing Fictions in Film: remember the medi-
ated IST rests on an assumption of the transparency
of recorded images. But if Wilson were to assume an
intentional relation between seeing and imagining
Book Reviews
seeing, the complex nature of cinematic representa-
tion forces on him a particularly unwieldy version of
the Waltonian account of pictorial experience. When
my movie experience is one of both “seeing” an actor
and “seeing” the character he portrays, I would have
to imagine of my act of seeing the image that it is an
act of seeing the actor and imagine of my imagined
act of seeing the actor that it is an act of seeing the
character.
How can we know whether our imaginative en-
gagement with a movie’s image track has this com-
plex, recursive structure? In Seeing Fictions in Film,
Wilson admits to being deeply puzzled about “the
methodological status of the basic issues” in the de-
bate about cinematic narration (p. 121). He cannot
see how to settle the facts of the phenomenology of
our imaginative experience: a priori or conceptual
considerations are insufficient, as is introspection,
and experimental strategies are likely to be question-
begging (p. 121). This admission on Wilson’s part is
refreshing but also unsettling. It may leave the reader
unsure what to take away from Seeing Fictions in Film
and whether the issues that Wilson so compellingly
presents are worth continued philosophical investi-
gation. One thing is clear, however. If the investiga-
tion is to continue, it must do so only in light of the
distinctions drawn and cautions issued in Seeing Fic-
tions in Film. And it must carefully balance analysis
of general narrational forms and analysis of specific
films’ narrational strategies. The model for this kind
of balance is of course Seeing Fictions in Film itself.
KATHERINE THOMSON-JONES
Department of Philosophy
Oberlin College
bloom, paul. How Pleasure Works: The New Science
of Why We Like What We Like. New York: W. W.
Norton, 2010, 280 pp., $26.95 cloth, $16.95 paper.
Paul Bloom’s How Pleasure Works: The New Sci-
ence of Why We Like What We Like is an entertain-
ing, wide-reaching, and fast-paced examination of the
peculiar and everyday aspects of human pleasures.
Aimed at general audiences, the book focuses on
what science, in particular social, developmental, and
evolutionary psychology, can tell us about our plea-
sures. Along the way, Bloom engages with philosoph-
ical ideas, enough to spark connections for knowl-
edgeable readers, but not enough to divert from a
broad and entertaining view of pleasure as a product
of the peculiarities of our psychology and evolution-
ary history.
The main argument of the book is a defense of
psychological essentialism, the claim that human be-
ings believe that and behave as if things have invis-
395
ible essences or hidden natures that make them the
things that they are, and its application to understand-
ing pleasure. Our tendency to essentialist thinking is
the result of our evolutionary history and affects our
thinking and behavior in ways both good and bad,
apparent and hidden. In particular, he argues, this
tendency plays a central role in determining what we
like and why.
Our capacity for pleasure is rooted in our evolu-
tionary history and biology, and pleasures have been
linked by natural selection to things that are (or were
in the Pleistocene) good for us. Our developmental
trajectories reflect this, as do other aspects of our psy-
chology. Therefore, universal themes can be found in
what pleases us, regardless of our cultural heritage.
But variations abound, arising through cultural and
individual differences that make differences in belief.
“Painting is a cultural invention, but the love of art is
not. Societies have different stories, but stories share
certain plots. Tastes in food and sex differ—but not
by all that much” (p. 7). Pleasure is exquisitely sensi-
tive to our beliefs about things, such that our beliefs
about the origins, history, or associations of an ob-
ject strongly affect our reactions to it. Bloom spends
the rest of the book using these ideas to explain how
pleasure works across different domains, from sex to
food to art and imagination.
Bloom begins by arguing that essentialist think-
ing is a human universal and can be seen early on in
child development. As Bloom uses it, ‘essentialism’
describes a way of thinking about things, not a meta-
physical claim. In other words, Bloom is interested in
the evidence for and effects of essentialist thinking,
not in whether or not essences exist. His claim is that
much of our thinking, consciously or unconsciously,
involves the idea that objects, animals, and people
have invisible natures or essences that make them
what they are. We apply essentialist thinking to both
kinds of things and particulars. For example, when
we judge that something is a tiger, we assume that it
is not its appearance or behavior that determines this
(painting stripes on a lion does not make it a tiger),
but its underlying essence or deeper nature. Like-
wise, what makes Damai (one of two female tigers at
the National Zoo) the tiger that she is, and distinct
from Soyono (the other female tiger), is her essence.
Bloom’s writing is most engaging when he is dis-
cussing his own field of developmental psychology,
and he draws on his own and others’ research of-
ten throughout the book. To support the claim that
essentialist thinking emerges early in childhood and
affects how we think about other people, animals,
and objects, he discusses one study that asked chil-
dren to consider when a transformed animal (a tiger
wearing a lion suit, for example) changed categories
(ceased to be a tiger and became a lion), and chil-
dren could only be persuaded of a change in category
396
if they were told that a transformation occurred on
the inside; even very young children thought that
changes in appearance or surface features were not
sufficient for category change. Children are essential-
ists about a lot of artifacts and properties and tend to
assume that the name of a category picks out deeper,
more stable, properties. For example, Bloom tells of
a four-year-old who, in describing a classmate, said,
“Gabriel didn’t just hurt me! He hurt other kids, too!
He’s a hurter! Right, Mom? He’s a hurter!” (p. 17).
Bloom explains that essences can be viewed as im-
mutable parts of an object or can be acquired and lost
over time. Immutable, permanent essences Bloom
calls ‘category essences.’ For instance, what makes
Soyono both a tiger and a unique tiger is an im-
mutable, permanent essence (a “category essence”).
Bottled water just tastes better than tap water (we
think) because we (perhaps unconsciously) imag-
ine that there is some internal structural difference.
But some aspects of essence are transferable (“life-
force essence”). George Clooney’s category essence
is what makes him a human being and the special
individual that he is. His unique life-force essence is
something that might rub off onto his sweater, mak-
ing his sweater a very valuable item indeed to an ap-
preciating fan, but this essence might be weakened
or lost if the sweater were cleaned.
Life-force essences can be negative too. Bloom
points out that, while a fan might pay hundreds of
dollars for Clooney’s worn, unwashed sweater, no
amount of cleaning might persuade you to wear Jef-
frey Dahmer’s old sweater. The notion of an essence
is fairly elastic. It sometimes refers to the perceived
history of an object and sometimes to its imagined
internal structure. “What they have in common,”
Bloom argues, “is that they are invisible, they can
determine what an object is, and they can matter a
great deal” (p. 21).
The central argument of the book is that our be-
liefs about essences can help explain a wide range of
our preferences and pleasures. The chapter on gus-
tatory pleasures, for example, takes an unexpected
tour into cannibalism before discussing how our be-
liefs about the nature, origins, invisible structure, or
purity of foods affect our pleasure in eating it (or
whether we will eat it at all). Why cannibalism? Be-
cause many cannibalistic traditions seem to involve
the idea that by eating another person’s flesh, one can
appropriate that person’s essence (“you are what you
eat”). More mundane examples include studies that
show that the price of a bottle of wine affects the
perception of the quality of the wine, even among
experts, and that children prefer apples and milk that
come from McDonald’s.
Bloom’s point “isn’t that sensation plays no role
in experience. It is rather that sensation is always
colored by our beliefs, including our beliefs about
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
essences” (p. 49). In many cases, Bloom notes, it is
actually aliefs that are involved, not full-blown be-
liefs. ‘Alief’ is a term coined by Bloom’s colleague
Tamar Gendler to refer to more primitive versions of
beliefs that are responsive to how things seem, not
how things are. Pleasure is sensitive to aliefs even
when we work hard to counter them with more ra-
tional beliefs. For example, people are reluctant to
eat chocolate that is shaped like feces, or drink water
out of a clean, never used bedpan, even if they know
that the shape or vessel does not affect the substance
they would consume.
Bloom also has interesting things to say when he
travels farther from core evolutionary concerns like
food and sex to consider the pleasures of imagination,
art, and performance. As with preferences about food
and sexual partners, our reactions to art are colored
by our beliefs about their essences. In the case of art,
these essentialist beliefs usually revolve around the
origin or history of the artwork. As with a bottle of
wine with a $100 price sticker on it, a “Vermeer” is
simply perceived as better than a “van Meegeren,”
and valued accordingly, even if the latter is a faithful
copy of the first. Forgeries, even exact duplicates, of
famous works are not valued as much as the originals,
and learning that a performance or work of art is by a
great artist changes how we perceive it. Why should
this be, unless we are reacting to something other
than its formal properties, to the perceived history of
the object, its essence? What we believe about the
creation and history of a work of art directly affects
how much pleasure we get from it.
Bloom ranges beyond essentialism to discuss some
other features of artworks that affect our preferences,
such as our familiarity with it (the “mere exposure
effect”), and findings from experimental aesthetics
about complexity of patterns or preferences for con-
sonant over dissonant sounds in music. His discussion
of the role of more formal aspects of the works them-
selves (“low level properties”) feels relatively brief,
however. It seems that Bloom thinks that these prop-
erties do not play a significant role in explaining our
preferences or that the research is simply too sparse
or speculative. Bloom does make clear that he is not
claiming that essentialism explains everything about
aesthetic pleasure and preference.
Bloom comes back to essentialism in consider-
ing the larger question of why we value paintings
and other artworks at all. He hypothesizes that we
evolved to take pleasure in art (and other highly spe-
cialized performances, such as sports) because art-
works are highly informative virtuoso displays. “Dis-
plays of cleverness, discipline, strength, speed, and
so on capture our interest because they reveal rel-
evant properties of an individual” (p. 136). Artists,
likewise, exhibit these qualities and are rare and at-
tractive individuals. Original, authentic works of art
Book Reviews
have special histories because they came into being
through a unique creative process and are expres-
sions of rare and genuine talent. The essentialist
theory, then, helps explain why we value original
works and authentic performances as well as the
artists and athletes who give rise to them.
It also suggests that we care about the intentions
of the artist. “Accidental” or “found” art, or anything
that is not the result of a deliberate intention to create
art, is not as highly valued. Bloom and Gelman tested
this on three-year-olds, showing them a blob of paint
on a canvas and, in one condition, describing it as the
result of a child accidentally spilling his paint, and, in
the other condition, as painted on purpose by a child
who was intending to create a painting of a blob. They
found that, as predicted, most children described only
the deliberately intended blob as “a painting.” Too,
they found that children relied on what they know
about a drawing’s history (what the artist intended to
draw) in naming a picture. If a scribble is intended to
be a spoon (because the artist was looking at a spoon
when she drew it), then children label it a spoon. An
identical scribble created by a perceived intention to
draw a fork gets labeled a fork. Such findings are used
to support the claim that for most people, at least,
intentions and histories matter and make a difference
in what objects we find pleasurable.
Bloom’s book makes a good case for the claim
that our pleasures and preferences can be strongly
influenced by our beliefs about objects and their his-
tories or creators. This essentialist approach makes
sense of some of the quirks and puzzles about plea-
sure: our preferences for originals over copies, our
interest in the purity or authenticity of food, sexual
partners, and performances, a willingness to spend
thousands of dollars on an ordinary tape measure
that was once owned by John F. Kennedy. It also
brings together fascinating research on children’s de-
veloping beliefs about categories, art, and fictional
characters. Bloom’s extension of his theory to plea-
sure in art and music, while explaining some proper-
ties of our aesthetic preferences very well, pays less
attention to other factors such as the roles of formal
properties of the artworks themselves, which may
leave some readers wanting more.
LAURA SIZER
School of Cognitive Science
Hampshire College
mcfee, graham. The Philosophical Aesthetics of
Dance: Identity, Performance and Understand-
ing. Alton, Hampshire, UK: Dance Books, 2011,
xviii + 342 pp., $34.95 paper.
Francis Sparshott concludes his influential magnum
opus A Measured Pace: Toward a Philosophical Un-
derstanding of the Arts of Dance (University of
397
Toronto Press, 1995) as follows: “we are still left
asking whether a philosophical consideration of the
dance is likely, in the foreseeable future, to blos-
som on the boughs of any considerable thicket in the
groves of academe” (p. 454). It is in Graham McFee’s
latest book, The Philosophical Aesthetics of Dance:
Identity, Performance and Understanding (hereafter,
PAD), that the future of dance aesthetics has arrived.
McFee’s recent monograph firmly (and finally) dis-
pels any lingering anxieties contemporary aestheti-
cians may have inherited from Sparshott’s guarded
remarks about the academic prospects for the philos-
ophy of dance.
McFee, like Sparshott, is one of a handful of
philosophers who is regarded internationally as a
dance expert. His previous works on the subject,
which include Understanding Dance (New York:
Routledge, 1992), The Concept of Dance Educa-
tion (New York: Routledge, 1994; revised edition
Pageantry Press, 2004), and an impressive array of
articles, are widely touted as “required reading” for
anyone with a theoretical interest in the art(s) of
movement. All of his many well-received analyses
of dance both demonstrate his deep respect for, and
understanding of, the idiosyncrasies of theater dance
practice and reveal the value of exploring it in a philo-
sophically rigorous way. But despite their virtues,
McFee’s earlier writings were only an intellectual
“warm-up” for the highly nuanced and complex study
that is PAD, which is his most significant contribution
to the philosophy of dance to date.
Although it is advertised (on the back matter of
the hard copy) as a stand-alone primer for “the inter-
ested general reader as well as for the postgraduate
student,” PAD is best understood as an extension of
McFee’s previous writing on dance art and as a com-
panion to his recent monograph on aesthetic theory,
Artistic Judgment (New York: Springer, 2011). It is
also of a piece with the conceptual frameworks he
adopts and defends in his books that are not dance
oriented (such as Free Will [McGill University Press,
2000]; Sports, Rules, and Values [New York: Rout-
ledge, 2004]; and Ethics, Knowledge, and Truth in
Sports Research [New York: Routledge, 2010]). As
a result, to dive into PAD without the benefit of fa-
miliarity with his other works is to appreciate only a
portion of what it has to offer. McFee’s latest mono-
graph is a comprehensive analytic treatment of dance
art that is read most fruitfully in light of experience
with a number of discrete things: dance art practice;
philosophy, in general; philosophical aesthetics; and
McFee’s previous writings. It is for precisely this rea-
son that PAD reflects the kind of “academic blos-
soming” of dance theory that would set Sparshott’s
mind at ease.
The key philosophical merit of PAD is that it is a
patient, but never unduly pedantic, text; McFee cov-
ers too much conceptual terrain to become bogged
398
down in useless repetition or pointless nitpicking.
The book is divided into four major sections, each
of which focuses on a particular aspect of dance art
practice. In Part 1, McFee takes up the subject of
“Dances as Performables.” Here he addresses the
question of how to understand the metaphysical char-
acter of works of dance art and extends, in a helpful
way, his well-known thesis of notationality, accord-
ing to which we should see the artistic creations of
choreographers as the ontological kin of other “per-
formable artworks” (such as musical compositions
and plays) given that it is in principle possible to cap-
ture the typal constraints of any dancework in some
kind of “adequate” score. This is the most dense and
conceptually rich part of the book because it includes
McFee’s thoughtful responses to a wide range of cri-
tiques that have been made of earlier versions of his
thesis of notationality. In answering his critics, McFee
sets out clearly how his ontological thesis, according
to which danceworks are types that can be repeatedly
tokened in performance, is related to his preferred
account of dancework identity and clarifies how this
metaphysical picture is conceptually entwined with
his epistemic account of the conditions under which
we correctly identify two performances as instances
of “the same dance.” In addition, McFee profitably
distinguishes his thesis of notationality from what
some might take to be its (unduly close!) theoretical
cousin: Nelson Goodman’s view that dance is an al-
lographic art form, that is, one whose works can, and
must, be fully capturable in a suitable notation.
In Part 2 of PAD, entitled “Making Artworks,”
McFee turns his attention to choreographers. Here
he begins by addressing the long-standing question of
how best to understand the role of authorial intention
with respect to artwork creation and meaning and
defends a version of hypothetical intentionalism re-
sponsive both to standard problems with “extreme”
views about interpretation and to potential weak-
nesses inherent in the theoretical “middle ground”
occupied by moderate actual intentionalists. While
the first moves in his analysis of the dancemaker en-
gage topics of general interest to aestheticians, the
second half of this section raises a number of new
dance-art-related questions. How should we under-
stand the role of improvisation in the composition of
danceworks? Is it conceptually coherent to speak of
works of dance art that are wholly improvised? And
how can the pervasive use of improvisation in both
the dance studio and on stage be compatible with the
thesis of notationality?
The content of Part 2, while not as fully developed
as that of Part 1, leads seamlessly to the third part
of the book (“The Dancer’s Share”), in which McFee
examines the special role of the dance performer and
attempts to characterize in a faithful way his or her
contribution to works of dance art, which involves
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
seeing the dancer as an artistic “craft-master” rather
than an “art-maker.” Part 3 also includes a timely
chapter in which McFee reviews carefully, and re-
sponds critically to, the pervasive danceworld view
that dancers are endowed with a special capacity
for “kinesthetic sensitivity” in virtue of which they
are able to perceive properties of dance art perfor-
mances that are not typically recognized by lay au-
dience members. Here McFee contributes positively
to the current debate about the relationship between
artistic understanding and scientific investigation by
exposing a number of “Achilles’ heels” in arguments
about art appreciation that rely on work done by
contemporary scientists.
In Part 4, “The Narrative of Dance History,”
McFee turns a new tack and investigates the distinc-
tive “stories” that bind together, and make possible,
our experiences of dance as art. He begins by asking
how best to understand and appreciate the efforts
of so-called dance reconstructors, those who create
live performances that aim to recapture “lost” dance-
works in a vivid way that can be both intellectually
productive and aesthetically gratifying for contem-
porary audiences. McFee’s remarks in this chapter
are important in two ways. They set the stage for
any future philosophical treatment of this particular
danceworld enterprise (which is rarely mentioned by
philosophers of dance). And they highlight the de-
gree to which it is necessary to have access to a
“usable history” in order to understand, and make
informed judgments about, artworks in all genres.
McFee’s reflections on reconstruction lead immedi-
ately to an extended discussion of dance appreciation
in which he articulates and defends the view that ap-
propriate judgments about dance art should be un-
derstood in terms of an “ideal critic,” where this is
(roughly) a person familiar with the historically im-
portant works that reflect the categories within which
a particular dance art performance was designed to
be experienced and evaluated.
In what many readers might countenance as a sur-
prising choice, McFee closes PAD by addressing the
topic that was the likely subject of Chapter 1: the def-
inition of dance. In light of his arguments about the
relevance (but mutability) of dance history, he urges
that what is involved in understanding dance can be
articulated profitably only in terms of danceworld
narratives and their concomitant categories (as these
would be mobilized by the “ideal (dance art) critic”).
We do not, he claims, improve our perception, appre-
ciation, or philosophical understanding of works of
dance art by attempting to provide necessary and suf-
ficient conditions that aim to exceptionlessly distin-
guish dancing from other kinds of moving, nor do we
make progress by trying to draw an unimpeachable
theoretical line between dance art and other artistic
performances that feature the moving human body.
Book Reviews
The final chapter of the book, therefore, high-
lights a number of themes that lie at the heart
of PAD: McFee’s commitment to contextualism in
all art-related matters, his allegiance to cognitivism
with respect to understanding art, and his dedica-
tion to the idea that artistic judgments are objec-
tive. While these may appear to be in tension with
one another, McFee’s protracted analysis of dance
art in terms of identity, performance, and under-
standing reveals how each may be part of a co-
herent theoretical story that improves our concep-
tual grasp of dance, enhances our practical ability
to appreciate it, and makes clear what is at stake in
our interactions with, and discussions about, art, in
general.
As a person with a serious interest in both the phi-
losophy of dance and aesthetic theory, my favorite
thing about this book is that it often left me intel-
lectually dissatisfied despite its carefully crafted ar-
guments. One of the monograph’s strengths is that it
continually invites the reader to challenge McFee’s
bold claims only to discover that it is more difficult
to defend the “easy” or “intuitive” or even “fairly-
well-thought-out” position than one might have an-
ticipated. I expect that a number of McFee’s key
claims will spark sustained and impassioned debate
among philosophers of dance: for example, his view
that danceworks are durable, determinate types that
can be preserved in text; his recommendation that
we should stop referring to dancers as performing
“artists”; and his suggestion that no unified account
of dancework reconstruction is theoretically possi-
ble. But the fact that PAD cannot help but incite
lively conversation within the community of aestheti-
cians interested in dance is exactly why it is an im-
portant book, since it comes at a time when dance
philosophy is sorely in need of the theoretical “jolt”
that only a new collection of well-crafted ideas can
provide. Without a book like PAD, dance aesthetics
might truly be in danger of failing to “blossom on the
boughs of any considerable thicket in the groves of
academe.”
In summary: for readers who are conceptually pre-
pared for it, PAD is a treasure trove of insightful
and challenging thoughts about how best to conceive
of dance art and the distinctive roles of those who
collaborate to make it possible. The book reaffirms
McFee’s reputation as one of the Western world’s
foremost thinkers about dance and presents his most
fully developed theory of dance art, while also ad-
vancing a number of new and important theses that
current philosophers interested in dance cannot ig-
nore in their future work. PAD is, in short, the “blos-
soming” of dance aesthetics. And all who have an
interest in dance are fortunate that Sparshott’s “fore-
seeable future” is now.
399
RENEE M. CONROY
Department of English and Philosophy
Purdue University Calumet
izenberg, oren. Being Numerous: Poetry and the
Ground of Social Life. Princeton University Press,
2011, ix + 234 pp., $65.00 cloth, $27.95 paper.
Being Numerous is a major work, and in the short
time since its publication it has become essential
reading in any area of literary studies concerned with
twentieth-century American poetry. Among much
else, it offers a fine lesson on how to read poetry
philosophically without reducing poetry to sagacious
sound bites, and so it shows the reader how to avoid
the most natural yet risible tendency one has when
attempting to write grandly about the intellectual
aspirations of poetry. Being Numerous is not with-
out problems, but it is always insightful, exciting, and
original. It even makes one love the Language poets
a little.
The trick Izenberg tries to pull off in Being Numer-
ous has both philosophical and critical dimensions.
In critical terms, Izenberg wishes to recast our under-
standing of the basic division of poetic labor in the
twentieth century. The prevailing view, so canonical
that it now goes more or less unquestioned, is that
twentieth-century poetry should be divided into two
strains, and that the difference between them is fun-
damentally a matter of the kind of artistic project a
poet takes up. There is the traditionalist strain that
struggles to find a way to inherit our poetic past in our
culturally challenged present. And there is the avant-
garde strain that wishes to undermine the past and
reconstitute poetry more or less entirely. Against this,
Izenberg makes the improbable but fascinating claim
that the division should be recast in terms of guiding
philosophical projects and not, or not just, competing
urges to receive or reject our poetic past. The philo-
sophical project essentially concerns not the nature of
poetry but of persons, and Izenberg understands this
in terms of a poet’s particular manner of exploring
what it means to be a human burdened with concerns
of sociality (hence the title).
Izenberg sees poetry “in the general sense” as “not
so much the expression of the imagination as a reve-
lation that imagination is the fundamental and value-
bearing aspect of our nature,” a poetic imagination
that strives to “reveal, exemplify or make manifest
a potential or ‘power’ that minimally distinguishes
what a person is” (p. 17). The poets Izenberg explores
are united by a common desire to abandon the idea
of poems as pure, or mere, aesthetic objects and to
recast poetry “as an occasion for reestablishing or
revealing the most basic unit of social life and for
securing the fundamental object of moral regard,”
400
the person being, of course, this fundamental object
(p. 2). In this respect, Izenberg adds a new strain to
the old taxonomy: the poet of personhood. But like
all radical critical moves, it ultimately undermines the
classificatory schema it attempts to complicate by re-
vealing that poets once divided by it in fact share a
poetic project, and so the old divisions no longer seem
to do much explanatory work. Indeed, the “lineage”
Izenberg explores links W. B. Yeats to Louis Zukof-
sky, which is no small feat and should suffice to give
a sense of the sweeping reclassifications Izenberg’s
theory makes possible.
The philosophical dimension of Izenberg’s trick
is less implausible than it seems at first blush. If it
strikes one as dubious that Language poets would
be interested in defining people and identifying the
grounds of social life (they do, after all, refuse to
make sense), recall that much poetry that is recog-
nizably romantic is in one way or another concerned
with the self and its experience of the world. Just
add to poetic romanticism a dash of characteristic
forms of twentieth-century disappointment with cul-
ture, politics, and selves and it becomes easy to see
how the conceptual unruliness and linguistic chaos
of much modernist and postmodern poetry can set
the stage not for avoiding the human but in fact for
articulating a “new humanism” (p. 4). It is a “new”
humanism in the sense that it charges a poet with the
task of rebuilding, more or less from the ground up,
our sense of what a person is, of how poems can create
communities around them, and of the sort of linguis-
tic and imaginative liberation required for all of this.
Plug Adorno in here and one can see why many of
these modern poets must be so “difficult” when going
about their poetic business. I simplify Izenberg’s ar-
guments here, but this should be enough to convince
one that his claims on behalf of the philosophical
preoccupations of twentieth-century poetry are not
much of a stretch and that, while revisionary, they
still allow us to acknowledge modes of inheritance.
The introduction, “Persons, Poetry, Personhood,”
is in many respects the most rewarding and signif-
icant part of the book. It develops the critical and
philosophical claims the subsequent chapters expand
upon by going on to attend to the particular, in this
case very close encounters with poets or poetic move-
ments that bring to earth the heady claims Izenberg
makes on behalf of twentieth-century poetry in the
introduction. Chapter 1, “White Thin Bone: Yeatsian
Personhood,” offers a fresh account of Yeats’s con-
cerns with sociality (the Irish state, in this case), with
the privileged role poetry could play in an ideal aes-
thetic education, and with various ways of thinking
about what a person is (Yeats felt the pull of both
radically particular or individualist conceptions and
abstractly Platonic conceptions). The second chap-
ter, “Oppen’s Silence, Crusoe’s Silence, and the Si-
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
lence of Other Minds,” is perhaps the best of the
bunch, and it explores the figure of Robinson Crusoe
in Oppen’s masterpiece, “Of Being Numerous.” Any
philosopher who has read Ludwig Wittgenstein on
private language or thought about Stanley Cavell on
claims to community will find this to be the most ex-
citing literary application in print of a set of concerns
that rarely leaves academic philosophy. Chapter 3,
“The Justice of My Feelings for Frank O’Hara,” is
about just what you would think, and it shows that
one of the apparently least philosophical American
poets, a poet of the “I do this, I do that” variety, turns
out to be something close to the poet of personhood
par excellence (p. 37). Izenberg finds in O’Hara an ex-
emplary attempt to engage the imagination of poetry
“in the general sense,” and he argues that O’Hara’s
cataloging of his likes and dislikes, interests and bore-
doms, affections and disgusts shows us how a person
can so much as begin to appear, in this way minimally
distinguishing what a person is. Chapter 4, “Language
and Collective Life,” looks at Leningrad, the col-
laboratively produced Language poem, and it uses
this to make good on the promise to clarify the idea
of poetry as having the power to create community,
even to identify “the most basic unit of social life”
(pp. 1–2). The fifth and final chapter, “We Are Read-
ing,” offers a case study of what happens when we
read poems together, as a community, and it issues a
plea to see the sort of shared frameworks of thought
and feeling this activity engenders as grounding a
conception of collective or “we-intentions” that are
crucial for human relationships and the growth of
social life.
I do not have a criticism so much as an expression
of slight incomprehension. There is no doubt that po-
ems of even the most difficult sort offer an occasion
for shared experience, that they can be the product
of collective, hence communal, efforts, and that even
the most exhilarating avant-garde oddities can cast
a kind of light on selves and persons, certainly in re-
spect to the likely psychological profiles of those who
create and appreciate them. But it initially strikes one
as hyperbole to claim that the poets explored in this
book are attempting to identify what a person mini-
mally is, to bring to light the basic unit of social life, or
“to secure the ground of identity; not just of how to do
things with a person, but how to know that a person
is there at all” (p. 39). The worry is that if one enlists
so literally and directly the language of long-standing
philosophical investigations to describe a radical po-
etic project, then one inevitably will risk cloaking
even the avant-garde in a new kind of traditionalism,
but now just a philosophical instead of poetic one.
Moreover, it inevitably sets up the expectation that
these questions will be answered and, of course, they
never are, at least not in philosophical terms, and so
one feels slightly frustrated at having one’s interest in
Book Reviews
hearing answers to long-standing philosophical prob-
lems enticed in the first place. But perhaps this misses
the point, since a poet’s response to a philosophical
question will naturally be a poetic and not a philo-
sophical response: it will come in the form of a poetic
rather than philosophical solution. Izenberg’s book
strikes me as showing (by example) as well as one
can what a poetic solution to a great philosophical
problem might look like. But I found myself wonder-
ing whether all the philosophical stage setting might
in certain crucial respects occlude rather than clarify
our ability to see what these poets contribute to our
possibilities of thinking about a person and the need
for social life. Ultimately, the reader is both dazzled
and a bit nonplussed by the philosophical richness of
Izenberg’s approach (but mostly dazzled). Perhaps
this is the problem: the introduction is brilliant, sub-
stantive, and one of the best I have seen in any piece
of academic writing. However, it inevitably forces the
book to climax before it reaches its natural conclu-
sion, and here the premature release registers as a
mild philosophical disappointment.
Being Numerous is an ambitious book, and in parts
it is almost deliriously intelligent. Even if one is not
completely convinced by some of its claims about
the philosophical concerns that underwrite modern
poetic projects, one cannot help but marvel at the
coming together of critical and philosophical talent.
The book is a must-read for those with a serious in-
terest in twentieth-century poetry, and it should be
of great interest to anyone who wishes to see how the
parties to the ancient quarrel might be reconciled.
JOHN GIBSON
Department of Philosophy
University of Louisville
sinnerbrink, robert. New Philosophies of Film:
Thinking Images. New York: Continuum, 2011,
247 pp., $100.00 cloth, $29.95 paper.
As someone who has been part of the philosophy
and/as/of film movement since the heady days of the
David Bordwell–Noël Carroll critique of Grand The-
ory in the late 1980s, I want to recommend Robert
Sinnerbrink’s new book to all philosophers of film
as well as to philosophers interested in film. It is the
best overview of the debate available, and absolutely
up to date. It would serve well as either a primary or
secondary text in many philosophy of film courses, in-
cluding graduate courses. Sinnerbrink offers a superb
review of what he quite rightly calls “the philosophies
of film.” He is interested in both cognitivist–analytic
models in the philosophy of film (Carroll, Bordwell,
Gregory Currie, Berys Gaut, and many more) and
other styles of philosophy of film (notably Stanley
401
Cavell and Gilles Deleuze). His ambition is to suggest
a new way of thinking about how a philosophically
invested approach to cinema can, given the right film
texts, recognize what he calls “a distinctive kind of
‘cinematic thinking’” (p. 5). In his introduction, Sin-
nerbrink poses the question, why did philosophy go
to the movies? His answer is a serious overview of the
major philosophers, mostly analytic–cognitivist, but
also continental, who have participated in the recent
flourishing of the philosophy of film.
The book is clearly structured. Part 1, “The
Analytic–Cognitivist Turn,” contains three chapters
tracing the reemergence of the philosophy of film in
the wake of the critique of Grand Theory led ini-
tially by Bordwell and Carroll. Grand Theory was
the name given by Bordwell and Carroll to the
dominant theoretical paradigm embraced by film
studies in the last decades of the twentieth cen-
tury, an amalgam of structuralist, poststructuralist,
Freudian–Lacanian, and Marxist–Althusserian film
theories. Part of what Bordwell and Carroll accom-
plished was to retrieve the study of film as a proper
object of philosophical attention. The first section
also reviews the renewed philosophical interest in
questions concerning the ontology of film and the
question of just what constitutes film narrative as
opposed to, say, literary narrative. Part 2, “From
Cognitivism to Film-Philosophy,” traces the develop-
ment of the possibility of conceiving of such a thing
as “film-philosophy”: a distinctively cinematic philo-
sophical discourse, exemplified here by the works
of Deleuze and Cavell. Part 2 concludes with an in-
vestigation of the recently hotly debated question
whether (at least some) films can actually do philos-
ophy. Sinnerbrink defends the idea that there really
is something philosophical that (some) films can do:
this is what he calls “cinematic thinking.” He devel-
ops his position in Part 3, where in separate chapters
he discusses David Lynch’s Inland Empire (2006),
Lars von Trier’s Antichrist (2009), and Terence
Malick’s The New World (2005). Finally, the terrific
appendix gives direction to those interested in find-
ing related readings, filmographies, and websites.
Sinnerbrink is in complete control of the ma-
terial he discusses. He knows the film-philosophy
literature. He knows it from the early days of the
analytic tradition (Hugo Munsterberg, Rudolph
Arnheim, Alexander Sesonske, Francis Sparshott)
to very recently published works (including Carroll,
Amy Coplan, Dan Flory, Gaut, and Katherine
Thomson-Jones). He discusses with insight the work
of more philosophers of film than I have ever seen
assembled in one place. And he knows the cinematic
examples he uses both for illustrative purposes
and as test cases in their own right. The number of
concrete examples Sinnerbrink introduces into his
examination of film-philosophy is impressive both
402
for its breadth and for his selection and description
of telling details. The book’s filmography runs five
pages and includes, to name just some of his exam-
ples, Joseph Mankiewicz’s All About Eve (1950), Pier
Paolo Pasolini’s The Canterbury Tales (1972), Pedro
Almodóvar’s All About My Mother (1999), Lynch’s
Mulholland Drive (2001), Christopher Nolan’s Me-
mento (2000), and Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a
Marriage (1973). A recurring theme is Sinnerbrink’s
commitment to the idea that a proper understanding
of film-philosophy requires more than a cognitivist
or emotivist position, but a perspective that adds a
focus on the aesthetics of particular films, especially
their narrative structures, their particular film styles,
their representation of characters, and their use of
(or disregard of) generic conventions.
To give a sense of what Sinnerbrink is doing in
this book, I speak in somewhat more detail about
four issues: questions of philosophical approaches to
film narrative (Chapter 3); the examination of both
the “commonsense” notion of identification and the
more philosophically developed versions recently
on offer, including notions of character engagement
(from Chapter 4); the very idea of film as philosophy
(from Chapter 6); and finally, Sinnerbrink’s argument
that The New World should be construed philo-
sophically as an example of cinematic romanticism
(Chapter 9).
After reviewing recent approaches to the ques-
tion of the ontology of film in Chapter 2, Sinnerbrink
turns, in Chapter 3, to consider “the differences be-
tween literary and cinematic narrative, the signifi-
cance of plot, story and style, the problem of cine-
matic authorship, and the vexed question of whether
films have narrators” (pp. 45–46). The key figures
here are Bordwell and Carroll, and Sinnerbrink’s
question is whether their approach to these ques-
tions is too intellectualizing. The concern is that the
Bordwell–Carroll model seems to depend on the idea
that viewers engage with narrative films by assuming
that a film narrative poses and then answers a se-
ries of questions, leaving the viewer’s satisfaction to
depend upon the degree to which she either antic-
ipates the right answer or experiences the thrill or
frustration of surprise when her guess turns out to be
wrong. The review of Bordwell’s use of the key con-
cepts used by the Russian formalists (the distinction
they draw between story-fabula and plot-syuzhet) is
clearly presented. Carroll’s “erotetic narrative” pro-
posal is examined. The discussion of narrative struc-
ture is followed by the thorny question of whether
films can be said to have authors. If we can find a sat-
isfactory way to identify a film author (whether indi-
vidual or collaborative), should we also ask whether
narrative films have narrators? Given the manifest
differences between, say, literature and film, what
would constitute a filmic narrator? How should we
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
understand the idea of an implied author as opposed
to an implied narrator? The chapter concludes with
discussions of the use of diegetic versus implied nar-
rators in All About Eve, Pasolini’s The Canterbury
Tales, and Spike Jonze’s and Charlie Kaufmann’s
Adaptation (2002).
A major part of Chapter 4 is devoted to the ques-
tion of identification—a subject that has vexed me
for years. There is a great line from an early scene in
Ice Age: The Meltdown (Carlos Saldanha, 2006) that
captures my frustration. Manny the mammoth has
just told a story to the little creatures who attend Syd
the sloth’s daycare. Manny’s story ends with, “And
they all lived happily ever after.” After a pause, one
of the daycare tots objects, saying that the story is
not “relatable,” and other little ones chime in. What
this anecdote captures, and what Sinnerbrink nicely
describes, is the need to sort out a “commonsense”
understanding of “identification,” put bluntly, relata-
bility, from something more philosophically robust.
Many philosophers of film have criticized the very
idea of character identification. Some, by contrast,
have tried to offer a defense of the idea. Sinnerbrink
surveys Carroll, Gaut, Kendall Walton, Currie, and
Carl Plantinga, as well as both Murray Smith and
Greg Smith. The strengths of what Carroll has called
“criterial prefocusing” are considered, but Murray
Smith’s tripartite breakdown of the idea of identifica-
tion (which involves recognition, alignment, and alle-
giance) is offered as a welcome development. Adding
to Murray Smith’s point is Greg Smith’s notion that
the aesthetics of particular films evoke a mood, rather
than just an erotetic pathway to be followed. Sinner-
brink’s preference in this general debate seems to be
with the two Smiths. As he says, speaking of Greg
Smith’s contribution, “Emotion is elicited and com-
municated aesthetically as well as cognitively” (p. 86).
The example of the shower murder sequence from
Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960) illustrates the im-
portance of aesthetically constructed mood over and
above mere erotetic involvement with Marion Crane
at the Bates Motel.
Sinnerbrink’s examination of the idea of film as
philosophy briefly reviews his previous discussion of
Cavell and Deleuze, but turns to consider Thomas
Wartenberg, Stephen Mulhall, Paisley Livingston,
and Aaron Smuts, among others. Sinnerbrink contex-
tualizes the question whether films actually do phi-
losophy or can at best merely illustrate philosophical
themes by asking us to rethink the hierarchical rela-
tionship often assumed to exist between philosophy
(the dominant discourse) and film, or for that matter,
art in general (p. 117). Mulhall, in his analysis of the
Alien quartet, famously defended the bold position
that films can philosophize, and did so with refer-
ence to popular Hollywood genre films. Wartenberg,
too, defends the idea that films can do philosophy,
Book Reviews
and like Mulhall typically discusses Hollywood
films, sometimes classics (Modern Times [Charlie
Chaplin, 1936], Citizen Kane [Orson Welles, 1941],
The Third Man [Carol Reed, 1949]) and some-
times lesser-known Hollywood films. Sinnerbrink
pays close attention to Livingston’s challenges to the
bold position. As Livingston argues, the problem with
the bold position is twofold. Only a human agent can
philosophize, so attributing the attribute of philoso-
phizing to a film without having supporting evidence
about the filmic author’s intentions is misguided.
Worse, the bold thesis presents us with a seemingly
unfixable dilemma. If the film’s philosophical content
is paraphrasable, that is, if the distinctively cinematic
aspect of the expression of a film’s philosophical con-
tent can be cashed out in language, then it would seem
that the real philosophical work is done just as well
through the linguistic paraphrase as by the film, mak-
ing the film redundant. Or if the film’s philosophical
content is not paraphrasable, then it remains ineffa-
ble. The dilemma at the heart of the bold thesis is
the reason Livingston has opted for a more modest
view about film-philosophy. A firm advocate of the
notion of authorial intention, Livingston is prepared
to consider whether films can “do” philosophy only
in cases where there is strong evidence that the film’s
director intended that his or her film would present
or reflect on philosophical issues in a way that is
expressed cinematically. The chapter concludes with
Smuts’s reply to Livingston, suggesting that a version
of the bold thesis can in fact be defended. I take it that
the discussion about whether films do philosophy or
can philosophize will continue. Sinnerbrink is right
to say that any answer to this question depends in
large measure on what one thinks philosophy is and
what one thinks art can accomplish. He concludes
the second section of the book by suggesting that we
should overturn “the hierarchy between philosophy
and art” (p. 135).
Which leads me to the chapter on The New
World. I need to mention that, unlike some film-
philosophers, Sinnerbrink does not shy away from
focusing on what might be called works from the
“art cinema.” In this chapter, Sinnerbrink faithfully
describes Malick’s majesterial combination of cine-
matography, character action, arcing narrative, and
sound track, thus capturing the film’s unique aes-
thetic beauty. He admits that the film is in many ways
“enigmatic” and also “untimely” (p. 181). Because of
his interest in the aesthetics of film, Sinnerbrink fo-
cuses on the idea that Malick is “aesthetically mythol-
ogizing” the events presented in The New World, and
adds that Malick could be thought to have done much
the same in earlier films, including Days of Heaven
(1978) and The Thin Red Line (1998). In this chap-
ter, Sinnerbrink combines the best interpretive and
critical skills exemplified by the film-philosophers he
403
has discussed, producing a compelling interpretation
of Malick’s masterpiece.
Whether or not all philosophers of film will ulti-
mately agree that films can (or cannot) do philosophy
is not likely to be answered soon. In the meantime,
Sinnerbrink’s excellent overview of this timely ques-
tion deserves attention, and his concluding chapters,
which combine philosophical interrogation with so-
phisticated understanding of the films in question,
are excellent examples of the sort of film interpreta-
tion that I think philosophers of film will appreciate.
DEBORAH KNIGHT
Department of Philosophy
Queen’s University at Kingston
zuidervaart, lambert. Art in Public: Politics, Eco-
nomics, and a Democratic Culture. Cambridge
University Press, 2011, vii + 338 pp., $28.99 paper.
At a time when the culture wars are at fever pitch
and the call for budget cuts and reduction of the size
of government is at an all-time high, making the case
for government funding of the arts may now face its
most difficult challenges. Lambert Zuidervaart tack-
les these challenges head-on in Art in Public: Politics,
Economics, and a Democratic Culture, an ambitious
and robust defense of government arts funding that
emphasizes the social contribution and democratic
potential of contemporary art in the public sphere.
Zuidervaart’s latest is the second of two volumes.
The first is Artistic Truth: Aesthetics, Discourse, and
Imaginative Disclosure (Cambridge University Press,
2004), which draws on Theodor Adorno’s socially
critical aesthetics and Jurgen Habermas’s notion of
communicative rationality to develop a theory of
artistic truth. Art in Public “provides a social philo-
sophical context for the first volume’s claims about
artistic truth, and it employs those claims to develop a
new understanding of art’s role in civil society” (p. ix).
Zuidervaart has earned high praise as an Adorno
scholar. Both Artistic Truth and Social Philosophy
after Adorno (Cambridge University Press, 2007)
received the Symposium Book Award from the
Canadian Society for Continental Philosophy. Read-
ers of Art in Public will see why. Even while delving
into the details of postcapitalist social theory and
critical hermeneutics of art, Zuidervaart’s prose is
clear and mostly jargon-free, which will be refreshing
to readers unaccustomed to philosophy of art and
aesthetics in the continental tradition. Each chapter
begins with concisely stated aims and ends with a
summary, so if one gets bogged down in the details of
economic, social, and cultural theory (as this reader
sometimes did), the clarity and organization of the
text helps one get back on track with relative ease.
404
And as the former president of the Urban Institute
for Contemporary Arts in Grand Rapids, Michigan,
Zuidervaart has a thorough, practical understanding
of the very complex issues surrounding public art and
how it is funded. But let me be clear: Art in Public is
primarily a scholarly work that is highly theoretical.
It is not really about particular public artworks
themselves (with some exceptions; there are a few
examples) but about the normative social, political,
economic, and philosophical underpinnings that
must be in place for contemporary art to justifiably
receive government funding and contribute to the
formation of a democratic culture. This approach,
along with impressive scholarship and theoretical
acumen, is what sets this book apart from others
on public art. Where most books on the subject
are written from an art-historical approach, Art in
Public is a deeply philosophical work. Indeed, the
philosophical context Zuidervaart outlines can cause
one to lose sight of the content of the overall project
at times. But this is a minor distraction, which I get
to later; first, a brief summary.
The book is divided into three parts, “Dou-
ble Deficit,” “Civil Society,” and “Modernism
Remixed.” Chapter 1, “Culture Wars,” begins with
an outline of three conceptual polarities that frame
the current debate over government funding of the
arts in a way that obscures a clear vision of how con-
temporary art can contribute to a democratic soci-
ety. The first polarity, “Government versus Market,”
shows an opposition between advocacy of govern-
ment funding for the arts and a hard-line endorse-
ment of free market capitalism regarding the role of
art in contemporary society. This polarity, the author
argues, perpetuates the culture wars by describing
the role of art in society in instrumental terms: art is
either a public good that deserves government fund-
ing to provide that good, or the value of art is entirely
cashed out (literally) in terms of the invisible hand
of the marketplace. Both approaches point to a faith
in the status quo. Those who advocate government
funding have confidence in a system that attracts cor-
porate donations via institutions like the National
Endowment for the Arts, and those who endorse a
free market approach have confidence in the same
system that views art’s value as just another expres-
sion of rational self-interest. The second polarity is
that between freedom and authority. Here the point
is that those on the side of government funding think
of art as an example of the right to free expression,
whereas those in the opposition see government as
an authority with the obligation to uphold traditional
values and stifle free expression through censorship
when those values are not upheld. Both sides suf-
fer from an outdated, modernist view of the artist
as an isolated individual who is bent on challenging
the status quo for better or worse. The third polarity
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
is “Provocation versus Decadence,” which furthers
the second polarity’s vision of the artist as avant-
garde provocateur, who must be reined in by es-
tablished government authority. What is interesting
about these conceptual polarities is that both camps
rely on government to either fund and thereby pro-
mote free expression or use the power of the state to
uphold traditional values. Dismantling these polari-
ties is therefore necessary, according to the author,
if we are to get past the culture wars and develop a
democratic culture.
Chapters 2 and 3 examine a double deficit that
these polarities also perpetuate. Chapter 2 reviews
standard economic arguments for government arts
funding (efficiency arguments, equity arguments, and
merit arguments, respectively) and points to a cul-
tural deficit in these arguments, whose underlying
assumptions are incompatible with a fully developed
notion of culture, just because they are merely eco-
nomic arguments. Likewise, Chapter 3 uncovers a
democratic deficit in mainstream political justifica-
tions for government arts funding (those offered by
Joel Feinberg, John Rawls, and Ronald Dworkin)
that ignore how art can contribute to a democratic
society by drawing attention to current issues in the
public sphere and facilitating democratic dialogue re-
garding those issues.
The next three chapters that make up Part 2 de-
velop the notions of civic society and the concept
of the public sphere as a way to provide philosoph-
ical context that paves the way for an alternative to
the polarities discussed in Part 1. Chapter 4 reviews
Habermas’s notion of the public sphere as it may re-
late to art, analyzes Jean Cohen and Andrew Arato’s
similar approach in Civil Society and Political The-
ory (Cambridge University Press, 1992), points to
Nancy Fraser’s Justice Interruptus (New York: Rout-
ledge, 1997) and Seyla Benhabib’s Situating the Self
(New York: Routledge, 1992) as feminist revisions of
the notion of the public sphere, and then develops
a notion of art in the public sphere by referring to
(but not entirely agreeing with) Hilde Hein’s views
in Public Art: Thinking Museums Differently (Lan-
ham, MD: AltaMira, 2006). Needless to say, there is
a lot going on in this chapter, too much for me to
fully explicate here. The level of scholarship is both
impressive and can be dizzying. This chapter will ap-
peal to those more interested in the philosophical
details of social and political theory, but the general
point Zuidervaart makes is clear: “the arts need a
form of economic organization that keeps them rela-
tively independent of both the economic system and
the administrative state” (p. 128).
Chapter 5 is even more ambitious, and further
develops a notion of the civic sector that is nec-
essary to “generate a normative and critical the-
ory that supports enlightened public policies and
Book Reviews
transformational economic strategies” (p. 130). The
author reviews a variety of “failure theories” (gov-
ernment failure, contract failure, and voluntary fail-
ure), theories that depend on a notion of inevitable
market failure, a failure to provide the goods that the
arts offer. Only the actions of robust civic sector arts
organizations can provide an alternative to these the-
ories and contribute to a social economy that allows
art in public to survive.
In Chapter 6, the author discusses and builds upon
a study of the arts and globalization by Joost Smiers
in Arts under Pressure (New York: Zed, 2003), iden-
tifies systemic pressures on arts organizations from
globalization, and offers an example from the Urban
Institute for Contemporary Arts that illustrates how
such pressures can be alleviated and further art in
public’s contribution to civil society.
Chapter 7 introduces the concept of relational au-
tonomy, which is meant to provide an alternative ac-
count to art’s autonomy, traditionally conceived. Re-
lational autonomy is divided into three parts: societal
autonomy, which relates art to political and economic
systems, internal autonomy, which helps distinguish
art from other cultural institutions and identifies its
intrinsic worth, and interpersonal autonomy, which is
about the normative element of agency among mem-
bers involved in the arts. While the first and third
conceptions of autonomy that Zuidervaart explains
seem both plausible and correct, I am skeptical about
his conception of the internal autonomy of art, mostly
because it relies on a notion of the aesthetic as “imag-
inative disclosure.” To my ear, this sounds akin to
the fashionable Relational Aesthetics (Les Presses du
Réel, 2002) made popular by Nicholas Bourriaud and
has more to do with the shared values and interpreta-
tions that art has to offer than with aesthetic proper-
ties of objects. Moreover, this characterization of the
aesthetic does not seem necessary for Zuidervaart
to develop his case for government funding of the
arts, which is primarily based on the social value and
democratic potential of art in public, not aesthetics.
More to the point, Chapter 8 elaborates on the
author’s conception of interpersonal autonomy by
emphasizing artistic authenticity and the social re-
sponsibility of artists. Artistic authenticity, as staying
true to one’s projects that sustains continued art mak-
ing, and social responsibility, as the expectation that
artists remain trustworthy, accountable, and respon-
sive to the public contribution their projects make,
must stand in a creative tension, according to the
author, in order for art in public to flourish, facili-
tate a social economy, and help build a democratic
culture.
Chapter 9 elaborates on the notion of a demo-
cratic culture and articulates three concepts neces-
sary to its development: participation, recognition,
and freedom. Participating in the arts, recognizing its
405
value, and having the freedom to do so all point to the
democratic potential of contemporary art in public.
In a section called “Artistic Midwifery,” Zuidervaart
makes some of his most compelling claims: “the prac-
tices and qualities people learn through proper en-
gagement with the arts would promote the critique,
creativity, and dialogue that nurture democratic dis-
positions” (p. 291). This is not to say that this sort of
engagement in the arts necessarily will give birth to a
more democratically engaged public, but the poten-
tial is there.
The tenth and final chapter, “Transforming Cul-
tural Policy,” provides a useful summary for those
who may have gotten lost along the way and traces
the trajectory the book has taken from culture wars
to democratic culture. Here Zuidervaart outlines his
sociocultural argument for government funding for
the arts in an astonishingly clear and detailed for-
mat, complete with listed premises and conclusions
and a detailed outline and explanation of each major
premise in his overall argument, a rare and refresh-
ing feat in continental philosophy. The case is strong
and his arguments are valid, though I wonder if pol-
icy makers will comprehend the theoretical context
enough for practical application of what Zuidervaart
proposes. That will remain to be seen. Nevertheless,
I highly recommend Art in Public to anyone inter-
ested in public art in general, and for anyone inter-
ested or involved in more specific discussions about
government funding of the arts, it should be required
reading.
JASON SIMUS
Department of Literature and Languages
Texas A & M University–Commerce
krauss, rosalind e. Under Blue Cup. MIT Press,
2011, 152 pp., 60 color illus., $24.95 cloth.
In 1997, Rosalind E. Krauss encountered what struck
her as the apotheosis of “installation art” in Kassel,
Germany, at Catherine David’s documenta X. Ac-
cording to Krauss’s account of this experience, the
diverse practices featured at Kassel demonstrated a
washing away of the very ground from which art is
capable of giving rise to meaning.
In 1999, Krauss suffered a near-fatal aneurysm.
Like the contemporary art featured at documenta X,
the aneurysm washed away the ground from which
Krauss entered into a meaningful relation to the
world, leaving this most voluble of critics without ei-
ther language or memory. These two traumatic events
frame the staccato argument that comprises Krauss’s
most recent book, Under Blue Cup. The antidote to
both, according to Krauss, is the recovery of memory
and the discovery of medium, the twin devices
406
necessary to counter the amnesia of contemporary
art.
Under Blue Cup is a highly personal meditation
on the parallel losses that both contemporary art and
subarachnoid hemorrhages entail. Krauss imagines
the victims of both to be lost at sea with no anchor,
no ledge against which to push off. For what is lost
in both cases is a specified context (the kind that
both medium and memory can provide) with which
meaning exclusively arises. By arguing for the ne-
cessity of medium specificity as the thing that limits
and enables meaning, Under Blue Cup is another in-
stallment in a long list of publications that Krauss
dedicates to articulating her “conviction as a critic
that the abandonment of the specific medium spells
the death of serious art” (Perpetual Inventory [MIT
Press, 2010], p. xiii). “If Under Blue Cup is about one
idea,” Krauss writes, “this [that is, the necessity of
medium specificity] is what it is about” (p. 19).
Once again, however, Krauss has challenged not
just contemporary art’s delusions about its ability to
jettison the ground of medium, but also modernism’s
missteps in properly articulating the medium’s sub-
stance and import. For the mediums Krauss enumer-
ates in this book look very different from the material
substrate that was Greenbergian flatness or even the
historically bound imperatives of Friedian optical-
ity. Rather, Krauss summons a cavalry of artists (to
make use of her own metaphor) to slay contempo-
rary art’s forgetfulness not by reminding artists what
a medium is, but by inventing new ones. Those in-
vented mediums rely not on the material conditions
of their support, but rather on something like the
Derridian concept of iterability (p. 2); they offer a
“rule,” in Krauss’s words, that guarantees meaning
for artist and viewer alike.
This is made clear in those whom Krauss has
chosen to designate with the accolade “knights of
the medium”: William Kentridge, Christian Marclay,
Ed Ruscha, James Coleman, Sophie Calle, Marcel
Broodthaers, and Bruce Nauman, each working in
what Krauss would term the “post-medium condi-
tion.” Which is not to say that they have no medi-
ums, but that such a condition itself acts as a kind
of determining structure, delimiting their practice
and the viewer’s relation to it. These artists’ medi-
ums include the act of erasure, sync sound, the au-
tomobile, and the cut. Not material supports, that
is, but recursive structure. Not convention as such,
but its emergence, its possibility, its necessity. And
who are the dragons Krauss has appointed these
knights to slay? The dematerialization of art, “art
as idea as idea,” Duchamp’s displacement of Picasso,
deconstruction’s critique of the self, and new me-
dia, medium’s “false friend” (p. 35). All are ves-
sels that serve to set meaning free, to untether the
viewer from the sure ground of medium specificity,
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
leaving her at sea, with no wall against which to
push off.
Comparing a debilitating stroke to the excesses
of contemporary art may seem melodramatic to say
the least, but the parallel that Krauss draws demon-
strates something central to art criticism as such. For
the process by which Krauss relates relearning lan-
guage is not unlike the critical process itself, which
is grounded in an unknown: the newly encountered
work of art. Our way into that work, according to
Krauss, is enabled by the piece itself, which lays bare
the machinery of its own making (and hence its mean-
ing). As Krauss repeatedly reports, her recovery of
language was only made possible once she recovered
some memory of herself: the scaffold of “who you
are” upon which she slowly constructed a meaningful
world. The question of “who you are” is exactly what
contemporary art forgoes, Krauss argues, in its “for-
getting of how the medium undergirds the very pos-
sibilities of art” (pp. 2, 19, 32). Memory and medium,
which are treated interchangeably throughout this
text, provide the scaffold for meaning as such, in art
as in life.
The parallel drawn between stroke and installa-
tion art also demonstrates a central conviction in
Krauss’s particular pursuit of art criticism: the ne-
cessity of having a personal stake in the work with
which you are engaged. Those stakes, the kind that,
as Stanley Cavell (a strong presence throughout this
book) reminds us, all works of serious art provoke,
emerge in and as Krauss’s voice, which slips so effort-
lessly from work to life and back again. It is this very
voice that acts as Krauss’s own medium specificity:
the device of art criticism that she herself inhabits
and lays bare. That support is laid bare in Under Blue
Cup through Krauss’s constant return to the personal
event that frames the book’s argument as a whole. It
is laid bare as well in her recourse to aphoristic struc-
ture (the staccato of the book’s argument), which
never allows the reader to be lulled into the “safe
harbor” (as she put it in The Optical Unconscious
[MIT Press, 1994]) of history’s narrative. Like the
book itself, whose rough-woven binding, sans dust-
cover, keeps our fingers alive to the object we cra-
dle, we are never left to wonder where the author
of this text really stands. From her 1972 essay “A
View of Modernism” (first published in Artforum 11
[September 1972]), where she publicly broke from
the ranks of modernist art criticism, through the fan-
tastically personal dialogue that structures The Op-
tical Unconscious, and including the techniques of
personal confession and conviction that mark all the
texts in between and since, Krauss’s is a voice that is
unmistakable. It is unmistakable not simply because
of the finality of her pronouncements and the strin-
gency of her judgments, but because of the presence
that Krauss’s own commitments and stakes never
Book Reviews
fail to obtain in the descriptions she so carefully un-
folds. Under Blue Cup demonstrates once again that
Krauss’s voice has a key role to play in all of her criti-
cal efforts: it is the ground against which art’s identity
and value can take form for us, the tireless readers of
her ever more meticulous prose.
CHRISTA NOEL ROBBINS
Chicago, Illinois
andina, tiziana. Arthur Danto: Philosopher of Pop.
Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars, 2011, 128
pp., $53.00 cloth.
What is the fate of the sensuous surface after
the object ceases being representative, imitative,
figurative, or expressive and instead becomes a
philosophical commentary on creative production,
reception, and objecthood? Is aesthetics equipped
with the proper tools for commenting on art in a
world where there is no longer any need to apply
ratio, adequation, or correspondence to sculpture,
painting, or performance? How can we explain
differences among indiscernibles, for example, the
varying fates of Brillo Boxes that are art boxes and
Brillo Boxes that are mere collections of kosher
scouring pads waiting for crusty lasagna trays? These
questions and others Italian aesthetician and scholar
Tiziana Andina gleefully raises in Arthur Danto:
Philosopher of Pop, a book taking as its central
problem the dual abandonments of aesthetics and
extensionalism by Arthur Danto as he confronts the
new demands of the contemporary object.
Throughout this thoughtful and lively exposition,
Andina’s pointed analysis is marked by a deep sense
of philosophical wonderment at how an analytic
force of nature like Arthur C. Danto should ever
have come to see Andy Warhol as indispensible
to the “subtle unbroken line” inclusive of Vasari,
Gombrich, and Greenberg: in other words, how a
high-minded aesthete steeped in the painterly tra-
dition should find anything commendable about
Warhol, who in his own way makes painting unnec-
essary (p. 8). Andina never ceases to convey her mar-
velous surprise at Danto’s gravitation to and enrap-
turement by Warhol’s famous Brillo Boxes, which
shake him out of the rut of mimesis and consensus to
which so much aesthetic theory succumbs and show
him an art-pocalyptic vision of an aesthetic object-
hood appropriate to a posthistorical present living
well beyond its relevance.
Andina is of course correct: if there is to be an
analytic philosophy of art, why should Andy Warhol
be its inspiration and apex? And furthermore, why
should Danto matter so profoundly outside ana-
lytic philosophy, where his influence has been the
strongest? Danto’s choice is a bizarre one, and clearly
407
Duchamp is the more likely candidate, his concep-
tualism being the place where idea and execution
first meet a principle of minimal artistic intervention.
The Warholian dynamic installed indelibly in Danto’s
thought is of course a scandal to analytic philosophy,
which struggles to come to terms with sensuality in
general, but is ultimately the best index and hallmark
of Danto’s brilliance: literally, a shining that illumi-
nates dark corners where philosophy is disarmed and
seems to have nothing to say.
Through this line of thinking, we wind up with
two different ways of talking about art: a traditional
aesthetics rooted in aesthesis, or sensation, and a phi-
losophy of art that transcends sensation to engage the
art object at the level of its semantic intentions and
promises. The first Danto leaves behind, arguing that
an object like Brillo Boxes has less to do with stim-
ulating retinal rods and cones than stepping outside
the art object to ask why all supermarket items are
not imbued with such value. My sense is that Andina
is not entirely satisfied with this duality and that her
future work will be the first to achieve a post-Danto
rapprochement of these very different modes of in-
quisition. For if the future is the temporal dimension
that gives history its solidity and that makes the Ideal
Chronicler an impossibility since he can only collect
events in a box, then it is the fundamental openness of
this fracture to which Andina’s work addresses itself.
Demonstrating a fluidity with Danto’s work
in and out of aesthetics, Andina arrives at her
irrepressible surprise and puzzlement, which, all in
all, is the book’s greatest strength, by first taking
a chronological tour of the Danto opus, examining
his other conformities and departures from analytic
method in order to set up his eventual leap into Pop
via Warhol. In her estimation, the first surprise and
ultimately the foreshadowing of Danto’s love affair
with Brillo comes with Danto’s work on Nietzsche,
which is Danto’s first Pop moment, as he casts his
gaze upon this dark prince who erodes the distinction
between philosophy and literature and, in doing so,
makes contemplation and writing “popular,” things
anyone can and should do. Nietzsche and Warhol
work splendidly together; as the angst and anguish
of Zarathustra eventually gives way to Warhol’s
cool epithet of choice, “Wow” (no exclamation
point), the question becomes why each of these
responses matters to Danto, who does something
truly uncharacteristic of the traditional analytic
philosopher in finding each maverick worthy of
examination propositionally and extensionally.
Like Nietzsche, Warhol is someone who returns an
exclusive process back to the world from which it was
first extracted, in his case humanizing artistic activ-
ity by de-professionalizing it and articulating its de-
professionalization through a series of experiments
in multiple authorship, simulation, autopilot, and
absence. In messianizing Warhol as the avatar of an
408
end, Danto literally becomes what Andina refers to
quite compellingly and accurately as a philosopher
of pop, someone for whom the world never ceases to
generate philosophical puzzles, only some of which
are aesthetic in nature. In this context, “Pop” traces
directly back to “popular,” conjuring that image of
the masses installed at the heart of modernism as
an urgent issue of quantity, revealing that for mod-
ernism, dealing with the sheer number of human
beings necessitates various solutions and compro-
mises, as with Nietzsche’s transvaluation of value,
or the idea that Christianity produces a slave moral-
ity managing the masses’ supernumerariness through
the production of a neutralizing docility.
Beyond the etymological path from “Pop” to
“popular,” there is supremely Pop’s onomatopoeia,
its reflection of the sound made when the interior
of an inflated surface merges with its exterior and
distributions of air are equalized. It is precisely this
second sense of “Pop” that speaks to Andina’s notion
of what Danto has accomplished in choosing Warhol
over Duchamp, Nietzsche over Frege. Reading be-
tween the lines, it is clear that, yes, something has
popped, and Andina is here to document the vio-
lence of that restoration of balance and to speculate
about what it can mean that entrenched ontologi-
cal distinctions have suddenly vanished. For Andina,
Danto worlds philosophy much as Warhol worlded
art: for both, the world becomes the primary mate-
rial that must be manipulated in cultural production,
as the multiple separations entailed by professional-
ism and its exclusivist labors dissolve. This popping
is the shattering of an eardrum, the rupture of a ves-
tigial organ, the sound of a prank or sneak attack,
as when one pops a paper bag to scare someone. It
recreates the world by restoring a lost unity, joining
what had been rent asunder, de-compartmentalizing
disciplines that have been forced to communicate
across an abyss through distorted, disruptive shouts
and screams.
Above and beyond this worlding of thought that
places Danto closer to Wittgenstein than Russell,
there is Andina’s own interest in Danto’s worlds on
Riverside Drive, at Columbia University, and at The
Nation: the university whose legacy he has shaped,
the warm domesticity of his life with painter Bar-
bara Westman, the challenge of transforming from
philosopher of art to art critic for a magazine with
an eminent liberal clientele. Andina maps Danto’s
New York City in the role of rapt traveler arriving
from a foreign land to create a travelogue that is an
homage, her steps through the city literally writing
the poem of these various worlds through the simple
act of locomotion. “Exquisitely pop,” Danto is New
York City’s philosopher, the person through whom
City-ness and its sensual cacophonies become incor-
porated into a larger, more comprehensive thinking
about history, art, and language, the very activities
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
that give human existence meaning, sense, a reason
to refer (p. 5).
Whether one defines ‘meaning’ analytically, exis-
tentially, extensionally, or aesthetically, the fact re-
mains that, as ens representans, the human creature
needs to represent, to fabricate, to fashion. Its se-
mantic vehicles do so much more than transport a
prefabricated essence labeled “meaning” or “con-
tent” from inside the balloon to outside the balloon,
or from one destination to another as paradigm of
aesthetic transport. For these vehicles transport and
transform subjectivity, producing aesthetic subjects
and inspiring them to speculate. Some, but not all, of
these speculations will be systematic, as happens in
analytic philosophy, and yet all will take on the prob-
lem of self and world in their own kind and hence be
full of meaning.
At times it will be important to talk about Truman
Capote or Daffy Duck, as Andina masterfully
does in a discussion about how representation and
context achieve an indissoluble synthesis I would
term co-aesthetic in a chapter hard at work carving
out an ontological positioning of the art object. At
times it will be urgent simply to glance at a map of
Manhattan and mark the spots where Danto’s and
Warhol’s worlds coincide in a Venn diagram of urban
experience. These moves are not detours: they are
deeply engaging responses on the part of Andina to
a philosophy she finds au courant and vital. Giving
Brillo and its beyond “an ontological dwelling
place,” Andina’s book refashions art as an enticing
set of enthymemic syllogisms radically requiring the
spectator’s participation in the game of interpreta-
tion, that little y we add to art’s x in order to combine
sensuality with intellection, surface with motive. As
such, it is an essential volume for both Danto and
Warhol scholars and is something I encourage any-
one who considers the wild ride that exhibition art
has endured from the Factory onward both exciting
and vertiginous to read, share, blog, tweet, and of
course talk about with a friend in real time (p. 90).
MICHAEL ANGELO TATA
New York City and Los Angeles
ravenal, john b., ed. Xu Bing: Tobacco Project,
Duke/Shanghai/Virginia, 1999–2011. Richmond:
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, 2011, 116 pp., $36.00
paper.
tsao, hsingyuan and roger t. ames, eds. Xu Bing
and Contemporary Chinese Art: Cultural and
Philosophical Reflections. SUNY Press, 2011,
xxiv + 231 pp., $24.95 paper.
“What is Buddha?” “The neigh of a horse.” This
Chan Buddhism fragment is like the warm-up act
Book Reviews
in a vaudeville show, meant to ready the audience for
what is to come: here, the review of a book of essays
about Xu Bing’s work and the catalogue for his re-
cent Tobacco Project. The point of the essays is to
demonstrate that qi cosmology and Chan Buddhism
inform contemporary Chinese art even as it exempli-
fies postmodernism’s view of the instability and am-
biguity of meaning and raises globalism’s question
about the authenticity of cross-cultural communica-
tion. There is a deep difference between the West’s
celebration of independence and individuality and
the Chinese commitment to the context-dependence
and connectedness of all things. Given this, the ques-
tion arises as to whether the growing international
presence of avant-garde Chinese art and the fact that
westerners were the first to appreciate and collect
this art means that it is welcome as the exotic other
or that it has been colonized by the West. The authors
answer with one voice: “neither.”
What does this tell us about the alleged binary op-
positions between China and the West and China’s
classical and contemporary art? That none of the op-
posing terms names some one consistent and self-
contained thing. There are more elements of China
and the West in each other, and of classical and
contemporary China in each other, than the dis-
turbingly simple oppositions acknowledge. More-
over, the West’s construction of “China” is hardly
the same as China’s identification of itself, as China’s
construction of “the West” is not one with the West’s
self-understanding. Nor are they static, and none is
adequate to the ceaseless workings of reality, messy
in its detail, glorious and corrupt, full of wonder and
terror, that no conceptual scheme can fully capture.
The book of essays grew out of a graduate seminar
conceived by the co-editors and taught by Hsingyuan
Tsao. Of the seven participants, two are philosophers
and five are art historians, three Western, three Chi-
nese, and one Japanese. Prominent in the book is Xu
Bing’s Book from the Sky (tianshu, heavenly writing).
Xu was born in China in 1955, his father a professor
and his mother a librarian at Beijing University. Sent
to the countryside in 1975 to be reeducated, he re-
turned two years later to study and then teach at
the China Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) in
Beijing. After Tiananmen Square in 1989, he moved
to New York and a decade later received a
MacArthur Foundation Award. In 2008 he became
a vice president of CAFA and now lives in New York
and Beijing. This places him in the history of China
and the cultures of China and the United States,
which is consistent with the Chinese view that the
identities of people, objects, and events are functions
of their past and present contexts.
Book from the Sky is an artwork composed of
4,000 characters Xu carved and had printed on fine
paper and bound as it would have been in the
409
Song Dynasty (960–1276). Four bound copies lie in
gleaming wooden boxes on the floor on either end
of 100 open copies lain in rows across the floor
on a low platform. Other pages, ribbon-like, cas-
cade from the ceiling and hang, poster-like, on the
walls. The viewer is cocooned in language, but it
turns out to be only language’s material side (sig-
nifiers) signifying nothing, each character a sense-
less combination of radicals from ancient scripts.
Faithful to the material side of language and its dis-
semination, Book makes a mockery of words’ role
as bearers of meaning. It pays homage to classical
Song culture, even as it echoes post-structuralism’s
foregrounding the signifier and sets its meanings
adrift, loosed from their moorings as they are in a
China where individual innovation and strong social
control vie.
The authors all want to show that Book from the
Sky has roots in China’s religio-philosophical tradi-
tion in which there is no transcendent authority, no
distinction between reality and appearance or object
and subject. Book unsettles its viewers by forcing
them to wonder how meaning is made and to recog-
nize that it is up to them to make something of this
puzzling work. Meaning is taken to be born of view-
ers’ experience: it is what happens to them when they
engage the artwork on its own terms and, for the mo-
ment, forget the categories with which they face the
world. Their readings are productive and creative.
Most of the author’s titles indicate their agreement
about what the viewer is to do: “Reading and Mis-
reading,” “A Case Study in the Making of Meaning,”
“A Religious Reading of Tianshu,” “Making Natural
Languages,” and “The Art of Chan Wordplay.”
The first article, by Hsingyuan Tsao, summarizes
the history of art in China after 1979, reminding us
that at first artists had no visual language at hand
other than that of the official art establishment. They
used that of the West only to strike out against the
state’s control of art. As they came to find their own
language they were already part of “the late capitalist
portrait of the post-industrial world” (p. 28). China
too is drawing capitalism’s portrait and drawing it in
its own image. In the next essay, Roger Ames intro-
duces Chinese cosmology within which nothing is cre-
ated ex nihilo. There is on this view no God to make
something out of nothing and therefore no quest for
origins or the certainty their discovery would bring.
There are only heaven, earth, and humankind that to-
gether comprise the ceaselessly moving cosmos. And
together they co-create its meaning, in situ, not ex ni-
hilo. The effect of Book from the Sky and an answer
such as “the neigh of a horse” is to shock audiences
into realizing that the creation of meaning is their re-
sponsibility as objectivity and orthodoxy recede and
to renew them as “unique, historical, contingent, and
provisional beings who struggle . . . to make sense
410
of the nonsense” (p. 61). They are this because of
the ceaseless flux and flow of the vital energy (qi) of
the cosmos. Ames says that the uniqueness and inno-
cence of meaning of the present moment give rise to
“the authentic experience of temporality” and calls
upon us to make the moment matter, which would
be to endow the experience of it with a quality both
aesthetic and religious (p. 61).
The idea of the religious is explored by Kuan-
Hung Chen, who distinguishes, with Dewey, the ex-
clusiveness of religion as a set of dogma from the
inclusiveness of the religious experience. A religious
experience is one compatible with qi cosmology ac-
cording to which everything is made of varying kinds
and portions of qi and is intrinsically connected with
(inclusive of) everything else. Playfulness, “the incar-
nation of imagination . . . and the most essential form
of adding meaning,” is best suited to give meaning to
the prima facie meaningless flow of energy (p. 86).
The power of Book is that it invites such playfulness.
This article and one by April Liu on Chan word-
play further detail myriad ways the work of Xu and
his peers refers to and rings changes on the cosmology
laid out by Ames. These changes are inevitable given
the degree to which China now interacts with the
West and the international artworld. Liu is at her best
in discussing the living word, one in which “meaning
is conveyed through direct experience rather than
linguistic means” (p. 124). A living word is one not
mediated by dead words, those defined in opposi-
tion to other words or by some connection with what
transcends them (forms, concepts), and produces a
state of mind free of binary oppositions. The Chan
Buddhist says meaning is silent, to be communicated
through showing, not saying.
Natural languages, broadly construed, are the sub-
ject of Richard Vinograd’s contribution. He takes
them to offer the promise of a universal code, which
certain works of contemporary Chinese art thwart
by denaturing the language. The kinds he identifies
are four: native as opposed to artificial or machine
languages; signs believed to be of divine origin, such
as the trigrams of the Book of Changes; legible signs
in the natural world; embodied texts, such as tattoos
and genetic codes. His article is rich with examples,
mostly of work by Xu Bing, with seventeen or so ex-
amples. Here are but two: in Helsinki-Himalaya Ex-
change (2000), a landscape is drawn with ink on paper
using Chinese characters instead of images for what
would be in the landscape, “tree,” “grove,” “stone.”
The character “tree” is used to produce the image
of a tree, for example. In Reading Landscape: After
Yuan Jian (2001), a copy of a painting by Yuan Jian
(Qing Dynasty, 1644–1912) is hung on the wall while
on the floor in front of it, and climbing up the wall
along its sides, are carved characters for elements in
it like “grass,” “water,” “cloud.” Clusters of the char-
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
acters are variously white, gray, black, turquoise, or
red. Presenting the grasses, water, and clouds both by
their images and their names, Xu closes the distance
between them and refuses to let the trees, grasses, and
water shake loose their names. He blurs the bound-
ary between the conventional relation between word
and object and the natural one between image and
object.
Jerome Silbergeld ends the collection with the
work of four contemporary Chinese artists who in-
habit a space between China and the West, the classi-
cal tradition and the modern or postmodern present,
and the like. There are places that are neither China
nor West, but it has been supposed that none can be
both. Yet the art of the four is both in that it is “not
just Chinese, but not not Chinese” (p. 195). We do not
say of van Gogh’s art, for example, that it is “not just
western but not not western” because of the influence
on him of Japanese woodcuts. In his case there was
no displacement, as Chinese artists in the West suf-
fer, nor the cultural upheaval of the artworld today
evidenced by a 2012 exhibition at the New Museum
in New York in which there are thirty-four artists (or
groups) in their twenties or thirties with only seven
from the United States or Europe. Like Xu Bing,
they “recognize the myth of a stable monocultural
past and express performatively the alternate reality
of their destabilized intercultural trajectory” (p. 178).
The authors are right that the artists are not
copying the West in their rigorous questioning of
the meaning of languages, verbal, natural, and so-
cial. Nonetheless, the artists are doing what post-
structuralists did, with this difference. The post-
structuralist said to look not at what a word does
mean (meanings having been laid down in the cor-
ridors of power) but at what, within the system to
which it belongs, it could mean. The Chinese instead
look to what a work or word evokes in them when
they have emptied it of familiar meanings or taken
it out of familiar contexts. Whereas post-structural
skepticism was a part of the antiestablishment mood
of the West in the 1960s and 1970s, the Chinese skep-
ticism is a result of the dizzying changes China has
undergone since 1978 and the intercultural trajectory,
inevitably destabilizing, followed by many, artists and
nonartists alike, in the nonwestern world.
All the authors but Vinograd and Silbergeld were
connected with the seminar taught by Mr. Tsao at the
University of British Columbia, which no doubt ac-
counts for the repetitiveness and narrow focus of the
seminar-connected contributors in making the point
that there is a connection between Chinese cosmol-
ogy and language-based art. So narrow is the focus
that the article by Kazuko Kamedo-Madar, a study
of a work by Xu that explores the “transmission of
meanings” across the languages of China, Japan, and
Korea, loses the Western reader through its allusions
Book Reviews
to the histories of these languages (p. 147). More-
over, it does not make good on its promise to focus
on “the transformability of languages in the com-
puter and digital age” (p. 147). These considerations
aside, the book is welcome for showing the Western
reader the traces of the Chinese classical in its con-
temporary art and for its two invaluable appendices:
an eleven-page bibliography and a fourteen-page list
of important events between 1979 and 2005 in China
and Taiwan.
Apiece with contemporary Chinese artists’ em-
phasis on language’s material side is their interest in
material things. The artist Zhang Huan makes sculp-
tures of large Buddha parts from remnants he found
in Tibet of bronze Buddha statues destroyed in the
Cultural Revolution. Xu Bing makes a work out of
dust from the explosion of the Twin Towers in New
York on 9/11. He writes in the dust spread out on
the floor, “As there is nothing from the first/ Where
does the dust itself collect?” Written by a seventh-
century Chan patriarch, Huineng, these lines follow:
“There is no Bhodi tree/ Nor stand of mirror bright.”
The four lines were written in reply to “Body is the
Bhodi (wisdom) tree/ Mind is like a bright mirror-
stand/ Take care to wipe it continually/ And allow no
dust to cling.” The reply is that there is no body, no
mind, no independently existing thing.
This is art whose subject is material history and
whose material, the result of the rampages of the Red
Guard and the destruction of the Twin Towers, and
subject are one. So too is tobacco the material and
subject of Tobacco Project: Duke/Shanghai/Virginia,
1999–2011, but now the subject is not an event, but
a culture and a history rich in contradiction and as
wide as the world. In Durham, North Carolina, to lec-
ture at Duke University, Xu Bing noticed the smell
of tobacco in the air and was led to discover the con-
nections among the tobacco magnate James Duke
(1856–1925), Duke University, which owes its exis-
tence to a trust fund he created, and the cigarette
production factory that the British American To-
bacco Company, a joint venture with the Dukes, set
up in Shanghai in 1905. The factory was built af-
ter a cigarette-rolling machine was invented in 1881
and James Duke saw the size of China’s population.
Tobacco has been among the most profitable foreign
businesses in China; no surprise since one-third of the
world’s tobacco is processed and consumed there.
Drawn to the “refinement of the materials” when
he visited a tobacco factory, he decided to limit him-
self to them and create a project based on tobacco
(p. 63). Because, he said, “the conception of an art-
work usually begins with a sense for one’s material,
the most rational relationship that exists between an
artist and his or her work. I wanted to use tobacco as
my primary creative medium” (p. 64). What emerged
is a trilogy: a first exhibition at Duke (2000), the
411
other two in Shanghai (2004) and Virginia (2011).
The latter was mounted at the suggestion of a trustee
of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Carolyn Hsu-
Balcer, whose family has ties to the tobacco industry
in China. So too does Virginia have strong ties to
tobacco. A visitor said in 1690 of the then British
commonwealth that there “Tobacco swallows up all
other Things” (p. 57). Each exhibition built on the
one before with new site-specific works and some
works made anew.
Though tobacco is the medium, little there is on
view that is innocent of words, images, or numbers.
The exhibited works show this to be consistent with
the post-structural view that everything is saturated
with language and the ancient Chinese view that
things are defined by their contexts, causal, histor-
ical, commercial. A telling juxtaposition was the dis-
play of columns of numbers marking the profits of
the British American Tobacco Company’s steps from
the vitrine holding the hospital charts of Xu Bing’s
father, who died of lung cancer in 1964. Slides of
these charts were projected on the walls of a Duke
Homestead building formerly used to sort and store
tobacco leaves. This many cigarettes made and sold;
that many people sickened and died. Tobacco’s near
equal measures of pleasure and pain. One of two
notable exhibits with images is Traveling Down the
River, in which a very long uncut burning cigarette is
laid out on a reproduction of a twelfth-century scroll,
Along the River During the Qingming Festival. Fire is
burning along (the image of) a river, marring (a copy
of) an iconic work of classical art in its course, and
marking time.
Another is A Window Facing Pudong, in which
ink-drawn images of the old Bund in Shanghai are
on the walls around the window through which the
Pudong district of today is seen. Image and real thing
are in such dialogue that their difference virtually
disappears. Past and present seem so close as to
make apt the news Xu Bing heard on the eve of
his Shanghai visit that a brand of the Duke-begun
British American Tobacco Company will open the
world’s second largest tobacco production complex
in Ji’an. As in 1905, there will be a huge financial and
technological investment in return for cheap Chinese
labor and a huge market.
In another image-work in Shanghai, 660,000
cigarettes were placed on the floor in the shape and
pattern of a tiger skin, using the white of the cigarettes
crossed by stripes of the gold filter tips. Called Honor
and Splendor in Shanghai, but 1st Class in Virginia,
where the tiger skin was represented with 500,000
cigarettes. Here the ferocious tiger, whose role in
China is like the lion’s in the West, is represented as
a rug to be walked over, violated as the iconic twelfth-
century painting was by having the cigarette burn its
way down its river. But it is words that abound on
412
tobacco leaves, cigarettes, and the paraphernalia of
their packaging in Tobacco Project. Tobacco Book,
the Virginia version (three by four feet), is made
of dried leaves and rubber stamped with a passage
from A True Discourse on the Present State of Vir-
ginia (1615). The Duke version (seven by four feet)
was stamped with words from Big Business in China:
Sino-Foreign Rivalry in the Cigarette Industry from
1890–1930 (1980). Tobacco beetles were put into the
vitrine with it; what they did not eat was burned in
a bonfire when the exhibit closed. The same-sized
Shanghai version was stamped with a Chinese trans-
lation of words from the same book. No beetles were
put to feed on it.
There were numerous small items. Matches
printed with lines from Frost’s Fire and Ice, “Some say
the world will end in fire,” a box of twelve cigarettes
stamped with lines in English from Mao’s Little Red
Book, accordion books made of the heavier gold pa-
pers at the end of filter cigarettes with Tang poems
in English typed on them. And so on. Two other
word-works are Reel Book and Backbone. The first
is made from a roll of thousands of yards of slightly
more than an inch wide uncut cigarette paper printed,
for the Duke exhibition, with lines from The Dukes
of Durham. The paper was wound around a spool,
put on a wooden reel, and threaded to a crank. Like
a Chinese hand scroll, it is rolled up when not be-
ing read. Backbone is a book made of about a hun-
dred historical tobacco stencils of brand names de-
signed to appear on boxes and crates of cigarettes.
Xu asked a writer friend, Rene Balcer, to compose
a poem using only the brand names. Balcer created
an ode to the African American women who did the
backbreaking work of tobacco processing whose first
lines, composed of the names of five brands, are “OH
MY BLACK SATIN DEW DROP/ OH MY BLACK
SWAN QUEEN OF THE EAST” (p. 26).
Xu Bing was drawn to tobacco, this member of
the nightshade (Solanaceae) family with its seventy
species that he first met through its odor, only when
he learned its history and encountered it in its re-
fined form in the tobacco factory. He began with
already processed tobacco and put it in larger and
larger causal, historical, and commercial contexts.
The Project itself, spread out over three cities and sev-
eral venues in Durham and Shanghai, is spread over
works that are verbal and visual, serious and funny.
Its catalogue, published by the Virginia Museum of
Fine Arts, has two articles on the Virginia exhibition,
one by a VMFA curator, John Ravenal, that begins
with reference to Book from the Sky and reads the
Tobacco Project as a continuation of the interroga-
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
tion of language, seeing tobacco as a wide-reaching
system of signs embodied in things, in practices, and
in behaviors; the other by an Amherst historian, Ed-
ward Melillo, that begins with the first account of
Amerindian tobacco use from a report of a slaving
expedition to the Americas in 1565. Two are on the
Shanghai exhibition, one by its curator, Wu Hung,
and the other by a Columbia University humanities
professor, Lydia Liu. Illustrations of forty-five items
in the Virginia exhibition are worth the price of the
book.
The last is by Xu Bing, who sees the result of his in-
terest in tobacco as “something enormous and grow-
ing, located between history and sociology,” in which
art is used to explore social issues that in turn inject
themselves into art (p. 67). He ends by saying: “And
sometimes that’s the way art arises and that’s what
it leads to: the sensitivity of certain people toward
a certain object causing the artistic methods of the
past to change while also bringing forth new ones”
(p. 67). This puts art in a context far broader than
that of Western art, but it makes of art an explo-
ration of the social role of a material thing, not an
intervention or a call to action as the art discussed
in Wang Chunchen’s Art Intervenes in Society (re-
viewed in JAAC) is. The relevant difference is no
doubt that Xu Bing has lived in New York since 1989
and Wang Chunchen, a curator at CAFA, lives in
Beijing.
The books under review speak to each other only
indirectly. The essays in Xu Bing and Contemporary
Chinese Art transform ancient cosmology and
contemporary art by looking at each through the
other’s lens and using the art to tell the ancient’s
tale: meanings are not ready-made, and so viewers
must play with words (post-structuralism) and free
such associations as they make from conventional
rules (Freud). The conceptual differences between
China and the West are deep, their metaphysics
alien, but the artworks are telling the same tale with
the relevant difference, seen in Tobacco Project, that
the art of the Chinese avant-garde shows more imag-
ination and empathy with the human adventure than
its counterpart in the West does. There is reason to
believe, however, that the more the members of one
group perform the experiment of imagining them-
selves members of the other, the more their moral
imaginations will grow and the art will have done its
job.
MARY BITTNER WISEMAN
Department of Philosophy
Graduate Center, City University of New York