Commonsense aesthetics of rural children

Abstract

Children's commonsense theory of art emerges gradually over many years. A realist method of reasoning gradually gives way to an un derstanding that art an intentional manifes tation of mind. Interviews with rural children, aged 11 and 14 years, revealed that a con ception of the role of the artist in picture production emerged before a conception of the role of the beholder. What makes some pictures beautiful? What makes some pictures better than others? The most interesting fact about philosophical aesthetics that such sim ply-formulated questions of evaluation are so very hard to answer. The study reported below documents a simple tech nique for getting children to infer ences about pictures: their answers can be classified to reveal something of the assumptions they about pictorial and goodness. We understand people well only when we understand the assumptions they make (Parsons, 1987: 3). Thinking about Pictures The supposition that children's as sumptions are acquired through repeated encounters with artworks, both as pro ducers and as beholders. Gradually, the children acquire a reflective awareness of the judgments they make, resulting in a theory of art (Freeman, 1991). The particular patterns of assumption that emerge will doubtless be shaped by the surrounding culture. It may be that the culture will provide taboos against depic tion of the human figure, or of the gods, or of scenes of poverty, or will legislate that any referent equally legitimate for the exercise of pictorial imagination. There no question but that the child's frame work theory of art culturally con strained. What becomes constrained the child's conception of how art serves human beliefs and desires. That is, the pictorial domain just one of the do mains to which children apply belief-de sire reasoning. The prevailing culture will doubtless control how far the children get in developing that form of pictorial reasoning. But what of deeper interest how the nature of artworks puts pe culiar obstacles in the path of any child who tries to think through the questions of why some pictures are beautiful and/ or good, and what can be believed and desired of pictures. A developing theory of art cannot be infinitely plastic. There are some brute facts about art that any reasoning has to respect. One fact that a picture can trigger a recognition of a scene without having any of the salient qualities of the scene. A picture of an ice-cream not itself necessarily as cold as an ice-cream: that the sort of fact that preschool children grasp (Beilin & Pearlman, 1991). Once a picture seen as contracting a representing relation with a scene (Per ner, 1991), a number of questions be come very difficult to think through. Thus, if you can have a nonfreezing picture of an ice-cream, can you have a nonugly picture of an ugly scene? Why would anyone admire a picture of a scary spi der? The point here that the peculiar properties of the representing relation in triggering scene-recognition without transportation of scene-properties onto the picture-plane raises a particular set of problems in explaining where pictorial and goodness come from. The VISUAL ARTS RESEARCH ? 1995 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois 1 This content downloaded from 157.55.39.147 on Sun, 07 Aug 2016 06:11:28 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms prevailing commonsense culture may well provide anodyne formulations for dealing with such problems: beauty in the eye of the beholder, there's no ac counting for taste, nobody can tell you what you like, and so forth. Hopefully, a good art-educator will help children become a little more sophisticated than trading in the smallchange of common sense aesthetics. The point of deeper interests what it about artworks that legitimates diversity of opinion in com monsense aesthetics. Let us now put together the above two paragraphs of this section. The first par agraph contained the assertion that chil dren acquire a theory that takes the form of belief-desire reasoning, and come to apply that reasoning to pictures. The second paragraph contained the asser tion that the same consideration which a puzzle for children in acquiring a theory of mind, the fact that mental rep resentations are not replicas of situa tions, makes it difficult to acquire a theory of art. Parallels between mental and pic torial representational puzzles have been well formulated by Perner (1991). in the next section we specify the basics of a mentalistic theory of pictures and then show how it can be used to generate expectations about children's pictorial reasoning. A Mentalistic Theory of Pictures Wollheim (1993) discussed the stark op position between theories that are based on the assumption that (a) pictorial sig nificance an objective property of pic tures that beholders attempt to detect, and (b) pictorial significance con structed by an act of judgment of the beholder. Wollheim commented that the latter assumption is an appropriate re sponse to the central fact about art: that it an intentional manifestation of (p. 134). The general point not a new one. Langer (1957: 61) had written about the representing relation that are not proxy for their objects, but are vehicles for the conception of ob jects-It the conceptions, not the things, that symbols directly 'mean' (ital. orig.). Pictures indeed contract relations not only with 'things' (triggering a rec ognition of a scene) but with the mind of the producer (the person who attempts to realise a pictorial conception) and with the mind of the beholder (the person who attempts an uptake of the pictorial com munication). A map of such relations would reveal the entities over which the child's emerging theory of art has to range. But before presenting such a map, let us note the force of the term 'inten tional' in the formulation of the central fact about art as being an 'intentional manifestation of mind'. The term 'inten tional' has had a particular significance in psychology over the past decade. Searle (1983: 1) opened his book In tentionality with the informal remark that 41 As a preliminary formulation we might say: Intentionality that property of many mental states and events by which they are directed at or about or of objects and states of affairs in the world. If, for ex ample, I have a belief, it must be a belief that such and such the case... if I have a desire, it must be a desire to do something or that something should hap pen or be the case. All intentional states specify relations between something and something else. The peculiarity of pic tures as intentional objects that the intentionality spread over many rela tions in the following way: a picture that of something not directed at that thing but at beholders, and the picture may be about (expressive of) the attitude of the artist toward the scene. In such a case, children are faced with a puzzle, once they grasp the 'central fact' of art: where should the of goodness of a picture be found in that net of intentional relations? Let us try a thought experiment of a traditional type in order to expose the alternative answers. Figure 1 shows the most basic inten tional net of Artist, Beholder, Picture, and 2 Norman H. Freeman and Daniella Sanger This content downloaded from 157.55.39.147 on Sun, 07 Aug 2016 06:11:28 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 32 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.