by Jon Lackman | 30 November 2007 | Books, Theory
In CAA Reviews, Peg Brand considers Alexander Nehamas’ new book Only a Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a World of Art:
This is a grand work by a distinguished scholar in the field of aesthetics, and as such, deserves the attention of art historians, theorists, and artists in addition to the book’s more predictable audience of philosophers. The scope of the phrase “world of art” is ambitious and extensive: Nehamas is as comfortable assessing ancient Greek art as he is rubbing elbows with the eighteenth-century man of taste, theorizing the gaze of Manet’s Olympia, and judging John Currin’s women to be beautiful bodies in ugly paintings …
Nehamas eloquently explores many familiar philosophical themes: reality versus appearance, the definition of “art” (e.g., in reference to work by Stelarc and Orlan), life experiences as the basis for judgments of taste, a cognitive—versus an emotion-based—approach to art, and the ever-present distinctions between artistic/aesthetic properties and non-artistic/non-aesthetic qualities of art. In a section entitled, “Beauty, Community, Universality,” for instance, Nehamas undertakes a persistent question that “haunts modern aesthetics,” viz., given our subjective responses to art, can there be universal judgments of beauty (79)? Here’s where a thoughtful and detail-oriented analytic philosopher shines: a judgment is not (necessarily) the conclusion of an interpretation, or of true and false descriptions; rather, there are no sufficient conditions for beauty. To eliminate differences of opinion would result in a “nightmare” of uniformity where, “Universal aesthetic agreement would mark the end of aesthetics” (86).
In other discussions, however, Nehamas’s thoroughness of thought seems lacking, as in his comparison of the power of art and beauty to that of friendship …
