Shall we follow dualistic or pluralistic divides of perceptual content and aesthetic experience?
Maria Rossi Jun 15, 2005 16:39 UT I have two questions about your summary of The Double Content of Art (DCA henceforth), which bear on the choice of dualism instead of pluralism (partially addressed in your reply to J.L. Guijarro). First question, according to DCA “artworks must be identified with the representational content of concrete artifacts” and “the normal case is one in which [i] a concrete artifact such as a physical picture represents [ii] the visual artwork itself, which in turn represents [iii] its subject matter, with two different kinds of representation being involved” (the numbering is mine). This analysis seems to uphold that artworks are essentially – and not accidentally – representational (two-level) apparatuses. If this claim is supposed to define the essence of any artwork, the claim faces the problem of accounting for literalist and minimalist artworks discussed by C. Greenberg [1] and M. Fried [2], in which a presented physical individual (object or sound event
