Wednesday, 11 January 2017 | 16.00 – 18.00
Senate House, Room 234
Brian Ball (New College of the Humanities)
Artistic Priorities
In this paper, I articulate and defend two explanatory priority theses in the theory of art. The first is that of evaluative over descriptive notions of art: art, I claim, is what ought to be good art. The second is that of practice over works: works of art are best understood as the products of activities which are themselves artistic in character. Throughout the paper I pursue an extended analogy between art and assertion: and along the way I discuss essentialism and anti-essentialism; the institutional theory of art and its intentionalist rivals; and issues in the ontology of artworks.
The talk will be free and open to all. For more information please visit our website www.londonaestheticsforum.org
The London Aesthetics Forum (Institute of Philosophy) is generously supported by the British Society of Aesthetics