Art, Ethics & Contexts of Creation | Workshop with Ted Nannicelli

Organized by the Department of Analytic Philosophy, Institute of Philosophy, Czech Academy of Science and the Academy of Fine Arts, Prague

Abstracts

Dangerous Visions

Tereza Hadravová

In my contribution, I will focus on the recent article by Ted Nannicelli and Andrea Bubenik, "Art, Ethics, and the Relativism of Distance." This paper explores the ethical critique of artworks from distant historical contexts, proposing that significant differences in moral outlooks of the generative and reception contexts should lead us to suspend our moral judgements. I plan to trace and partly reconstruct a dialogue between the authors and A. W. Eaton. Specifically, I read Eaton (2003) as saying that the message about the "real" nature of rape, which the Rape of Europa brings home, is still with us today and thus, there is "a less of a gulf" between the generative and receptive moral outlooks than the authors acknowledge. Furthermore (and beyond Eaton's original discussion that is arguably focused on our reception context), I will suggest that this particular moral bridge might help us to recognize moral structures of the remote society and thus bring one piece of evidence into what the authors rightly demand should be an interdisciplinary study of remote cultures.

What Artists Think

Tomáš Hříbek

Ted Nannicelli (2018) argues that many artists, encouraged by art critics and theorists, seem to assume that it is permissible to use otherwise ethically questionable means to produce art, if such means help express a significant perspective. I’ve decided to ask the artists at the local Art Academy what they actually think, and perhaps if they have ever actually used the ethically questionable means in their work themselves.

Philadelphia and Its Moral Lessons

Iris Vidmar Jovanović

In discussing the capacity of screen stories to impact our moral sensibility and help us achieve moral understanding, Ted Nannicelli criticizes Noel Carroll's interpretation of Jonathan Demme's 1993 film Philadelphia. On Carroll's view, Philadelphia successfully calibrates spectators' moral emotions in a way which makes them more sympathetic toward gay people and more open to recognizing their humanity, given the importance of family relations as depicted in the film. Nannicelli however criticizes this, by arguing that the film – and Carroll – rely on the wrong moral assumptions: gay people do not deserve moral respect on the account of being or having loving family members, but on the account of being human beings. However, argues Nannicelli, "this is not something that the film, on Carroll's account of it, at least, is designed to help audience understand" (2023, 21). My aim in this paper is to analyze the validity of Nannicelli's criticism: I argue that Nannicelli's criticism is justified but that it does not show that the moral lessons identified by Carroll are not valuable. I take this discussion as a springboard from which I explore the scope of moral lessons we expect morally valuable works of art to generate.

The role of the naturalness of the environment in environmental art

Štěpán Kubalík

In his article, The Interaction of Ethics and Aesthetics in Environmental Art, Ted Nannicelli discusses several aspects of the ethical dimension of environmental artworks, i.e., works incorporating or appropriating natural objects or parts of natural landscapes. One of the questions he addresses regards the relation between the aesthetic value of environmental artworks and the aesthetic value of the environment appropriated. Nannicelli makes a general observation that environmental artworks necessarily alter the aesthetic value of the environment or natural objects appropriated. This follows from the fact that such artworks diminish the naturalness of parts of the landscape they utilize. Finally, the paper arrives at a relatively strong thesis that “whatever aesthetic flaws inhere in those environmental artworks necessarily constitute aesthetic flaws in the environment insofar as those works incorporate part of nature.” (This can be considered also an ethical flaw of the work). The proposed comment focuses on this relation of necessity. Can we not think of any aesthetically problematic environmental artworks that would not impoverish the aesthetic value of the environment? Or Why should only aesthetically flawed environmental artworks (aesthetically flawed as artworks) bring about aesthetic damage to the environment when all environmental artworks diminish the naturalness of parts of the landscape they utilize?

What Counts as Contextual Factors? On Aesthetic Appreciation of Environmental Art and Nannicelli's Contextualism

Šárka Lojdová

In his article The Interaction of Ethics and Aesthetics in Environmental Art, Ted Nannicelli defends a production-oriented approach to ethical criticisms of environmental art and reflects on the impact of ethical appraisal on the aesthetic appreciation of environmental artworks. Nannicelli advances a contextualist position, i.e., that ethical flaws in environmental artworks may, but do not necessarily, constitute aesthetic flaws in those works depending on contextual factors. I am sympathetic to this view; however,  I also believe it necessary to specify what contextual factors should be considered when we aesthetically appreciate environmental artworks and how they influence our response. I claim that we cannot limit ourselves to the narrow context of the artwork and its environment; we should also allow for the context in which spectators engage with art. This is especially relevant for environmental art since our awareness of climate breakdown may make us more sensitive toward the ethical flaws of land art.

Screen Stories Which Resonate: On Ted Nannicelli’s Conception of Moral Understanding

Sabrina Muchová

My aim in this paper is to look more closely at the conception of the relation between moral understanding and screen stories developed by Ted Nannicelli in his text “Clarifying Moral Understanding”. Nannicelli points out the limitations emerging when we apply moral understanding to our experience of screen stories since screen stories seem to fall short of the complex requirements for moral improvement or even acquiring moral understanding as such. I want to suggest whether a broader view of what might count as moral understanding gained from screen stories would not help elaborate Nannicelli’s idea for a solution, namely that we should perceive the effect screen stories have on moral understanding as “processional” and “cumulative”, i.e. unfolding over a substantial amount of time (perhaps even a lifetime), several screenings and various stages of one’s moral development. I argue that moral understanding provided by screen stories may often be subtle and undetermined, but have an essential part in forming our character and the way we act, even if the change is not easily defined or directly perceivable.

Aesthetic Perception, Aesthetic Appreciation, and Doxastic Attitudes

Ted Nannicelli

This paper begins with an observation that has come to enjoy widespread acceptance amongst philosophers of art, and it explores some of its unappreciated implications for thinking about the perception and appreciation of artworks of other cultures. The observation is that the proper appreciation of an artwork (including correct perception of its aesthetically relevant properties) requires knowledge of its provenance – more specifically, it requires the ability to situate a work within the art-historical context of its creation. Over the last few decades, this view has been defended under the banner of “contextualism” in the philosophy of art.

Perhaps in part because of the influence of Kendall Walton’s “Categories of Art,” (1975) contextualists in aesthetics have tended to focus on art-historical knowledge as a route to veridical, or, at least, reliable aesthetic perception and proper appreciation. However, several aestheticians have observed that once one rejects “aesthetic empiricism” (Currie 1990) and accepts the basic insight about how provenance partly constitutes a work’s aesthetically relevant features, it is hard to see the rationale for restricting the salient bits of provenance to the art-historical context of creation (Davies 2003). In fact, there are plausible reasons to think many other, broadly cultural or social aspects of provenance could be partly constitutive of the work. And as Jenkin (2023) has observed in an important recent paper, the sorts of cognitive states that can have top-down effects on aesthetic perception extend well beyond art-historical knowledge (or propositional knowledge more broadly).

 Against this background, this paper makes a case for a further expansion of Waltonian contextualism in two ways – by acknowledging 1) facts about a work’s provenance relevant to the correct perception of its category and aesthetic features may be broadly social and cultural in nature, having less to do with creator’s artistic intentions and the art-historical context in which they work; and, 2) The cognitive content that is essential to the correct perception of the work’s category and aesthetic features may be broader than (propositional) knowledge; for example, it may be procedural knowledge (e.g. a knowing-how to engage with a work in a culturally specific way), or it may a doxastic attitude (e.g. culturally specific spiritual/religious beliefs/ moral beliefs).

 I explain and defend this proposal with reference to Australian aboriginal painting, Chinese animal art, and contemporary Western art cinema. In Waltonian style, I advance a psychological thesis and a normative thesis. The psychological thesis is this: Not only do doxastic attitudes have top-down effects on our perception of these artworks, but some (important) aesthetic effects of depend upon viewers having particular doxastic attitudes regarding, respectively, ancestral spirits, the moral status of non-human animals, and Christian beliefs.  The normative thesis is that the provenance of these works (in a suitably expanded sense) makes it necessary to have the relevant doxastic attitudes to correctly perceive some of their aesthetically relevant properties and fully appreciate the works.

The paper concludes by considering two apparent, potentially troubling questions raised by these theses. First, unlike knowledge, neither do all beliefs track the truth, nor are they all well-warranted; how could it be that possessing a (less epistemically reliable) doxastic attitude, might allow one to correctly perceive a work’s aesthetic features and guide proper aesthetic appreciation? Second, what should we make of the apparent corollary of the theses that aesthetic appreciation could be limited or impoverished if one lacks the relevant doxastic attitude – particularly if one finds evidentialism plausible.