It is a pleasure to welcome Nicholas Wolterstorff back to the philosophy of art, a discipline to which he contributed two notable books in 1980, Works and Worlds of Art and Art in Action: Towards a Christian Aesthetic, and then went on to pursue a stunning array of other topics in philosophy and its history. To begin with the necessary cliché, no one in the discipline of philosophy of art, who desires to remain at the cutting edge, can afford not to read Wolterstorff's thought-provoking new book.

The title of Wolterstorff's book, Art Rethought, is worth dwelling upon for a moment; for it is indicative of a sea change in philosophy of art that has been taking place now for a number of years. And Art Rethought is not, therefore, merely a product of its author's matchless philosophical skill and insight but a product, as well, of the philosophical Zeitgeist at work.

What Wolterstorff's title immediately conveys is the idea that we must ‘rethink’ what is to be done in the philosophy of art: turn our attention away from the relentless pursuit of the essence of art, in the singular, and turn to the vast variety of the arts, in the plural, and the vast array of ways in which we engage with them. And Wolterstorff is well aware of this trend. For as he writes in the Preface to Art Rethought, ‘I am by no means the only one calling for reconfiguration’ (x), citing, among others, Noel Carroll and Arnold Berleant as fellow travelers.

Indeed, in the case of the present reviewer, Wolterstorff is preaching to the choir, as I had already come to the conclusion, in 1997, that the relentless pursuit of a ‘definition’ of art, still then in place, tended ‘to discourage philosophers from the equally interesting task of studying the arts in their particularity’.Footnote ¹ And scarcely a year ago Dominic Lopes published a book called Beyond Art, the title of which conveying much the same message as Art Rethought, in which he makes clear, at the outset, that ‘The ambition of this book is to show that it is not mandatory to center the philosophical study of art on the question “What is art?” Put bluntly, this is the wrong question for philosophy’.Footnote ²

Woltorstorff's book proceeds, mainly, in four major stages. First, the author lays out his bête noire, what he calls The Grand Narrative of Art in the Modern World. In the second stage of the argument, Wolterstorff launches a devastating refutation of the grand narrative. Third, he presents A New Framework for Thinking About the Arts. There then follows a discussion of five different art genres in light of the new framework: Memorial Art; Art for Veneration; Social Protest Art; Art that Enhances; and, finally, Art-Reflexive Art. I shall outline and deal with these stages seriatim.

What Wolterstorff refers to as the grand narrative will be familiar to many of my readers in one form or another. It is, in essence, the emergence, in the eighteenth century, of the concept of ‘aesthetic disinterestedness’ and the contention that art comes into its own, becomes, in other words, what art essentially is, when it becomes that which is attended to exclusively in the attitude of aesthetic disinterestedness. As Wolterstorff puts it in one place, the adherent to the grand narrative ‘believes the arts come into their own when works of the arts are engaged as objects of disinterested attention, and…furthermore believes that works of the arts that reward that mode of engagement, and only such works, are socially other and transcendent, as are the activities of producing and contemplating such works…’ (33).

Wolterstorff presents and elaborates upon the grand narrative with admirable thoroughness and erudition. And perhaps it would be considered carping to point out two rather interesting omissions. But, after all, it is the reviewer's role to carp. Let me hasten to add, however, that the omissions I am about to cite by no means cast serious doubt about the general outlines of Wolterstorff's grand narrative.

One thing that is surprisingly absent from the grand narrative, as Wolterstorfrf presents it, is the role of genius, the concept of which, in its modern form, arose and was nurtured to maturity in the eighteenth century and came to dominate thinking about the arts in the nineteenth, beginning with Schopenhauer. Recall, for example, that Kant thought the fine arts and they alone were the products of genius, a view that Schopenhauer, as I read him, shared.

And, indeed, the concept of the artistic genius, either as the conduit of the Deity, or, in the Romantic era, virtually the Deity himself, comports well with Wolterstorff's quotations from Clive Bell, and others, which describe art and the aesthetic experience in distinctly religious terms, and the artist as a God surrogate.

My other hobby horse, made no mention of by Wolterstorff in his version of the grand narrative, is the rise to prominence and importance, of pure, textless instrumental music, in the second half of the eighteenth century. It was the eighteenth-century philosophers' ‘problem art’. Was it art?

On the one hand, pure instrumental music would appear the poster boy for the grand narrative. For it was pure formal structure, no representational ‘content’. What other way to appreciate it than as a pure aesthetic object in the attitude of aesthetic disinterestedness? It is the art to which all arts aspire.

But on the other hand, the problem is that during the eighteenth century the attitude of aesthetic disinterestedness had not yet attained hegemony. Thus, to adduce two prominent cases in point, Kant, in the third Critique, struggled with the question of whether music without a text could be fine art, never really reaching a conclusion one way or the other, and in the Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View averred that ‘it is only because music serves as an instrument for poetry that it is fine (not merely pleasant) art’.Footnote ³ Whereas Thomas Reid, contrariwise, had no qualms at all in admitting pure instrumental music into the Pantheon of the fine arts, since, on his view, ‘music, as well as poetry, is an imitative art’, as ‘every strain of melody that is agreeable, is an imitation of the human voice in the expression of some passion or sentiment’.Footnote ⁴

For Kant, then, texted music succeeds as a fine art because it, like poetry, has representational content; and for Reid, music without a text succeeds as a fine art only because it, like poetry, has a representational content. The eighteenth century was, indeed, the fons et origo of the concept of art as the object for the attitude of aesthetic disinterestedness. However, it had not entirely succumbed, nor does Wolterstorff's grand narrative suggest that it has done.

But on now to the second stage of Wolterstorff's argument, which is a devastating critique of the grand narrative. Some philosophers of art may come away from it with the feeling that the author is beating a dead horse. For I think there are, presently, few hold-outs for the view that artworks, tout court, are in essence, pure aesthetic objects of the disinterested attitude. Nevertheless, Wolterstorff's critique is essential to his argument, as it brings into the picture the very kinds of arts and kinds of engagement with them that he, quite rightly, believes have been neglected by philosophers of art, even those who have given up the purely aesthetic view of artworks that the grand narrative spawned.

Needless to say, I cannot present in detail, in so short a review, Wolterstorff's thorough debunking of the grand narrative. A superficial sketch, in his own words, must suffice.

First, some terminology. Wolterstorff writes: ‘When I use the term “the arts” with no qualifying adjective I will mean the traditional (fine) arts: poetry, prose fiction, drama, painting, sculpture, music, dance, and architecture. By “a work of the arts” I will then mean a work of one of those traditional (fine) arts’ (xiii).

With this terminology to hand, I can now state with brevity, and again in Wolterstorff's own words, why he thinks the grand narrative must go. ‘Given that the grand narrative is a story about the significance of works of the arts being increasingly engaged as objects of disinterested aesthetic attention, the narrative has no application to artworks that are not works of the arts. Further, a good many recent artworks do not have, and were not meant to have, aesthetic significance; their significance eludes the grand narrative’ (56–57).

We now have arrived at the third stage of Wolterstorff's argument in which he offers his new framework for thinking about the arts. Of it, Wolterstorff writes: ‘The two basic ideas in the general theory that I propose are the social practices of art and meaning in works of the arts and artworks’ (85).

As to the former: ‘Fundamental to the arts are the social practices for public engagement of works of the arts’ (76). Furthermore, a social practice is not, on Wolterstorff's view, merely the fact of a lot of people doing the same thing. ‘Though a number of people are now engaged in the activity, it's still not a social practice. To be a social practice, those who engage in the activity must be aware that others are doing so as well because they too prize the activity; thus mutual awareness is part of what makes the activity social’ (90–91). So, as a social practice, ‘we listen attentively to a performance of Brahms' Fourth Symphony, we stand silently before a work of memorial art, workers on the railroad sing while working’ (86); and so on. All of these, and many others, are ways of engaging art that are social practices of engagement.

As for meaning in works of the arts and artworks, Wolterstorff construes the meaning of ‘meaning’ quite broadly. In brief, first there is what he calls ‘act-meaning’. Thus: ‘If we don't know what Van Gogh was trying to do in his painting and drawing and for what reasons he was trying to do it, we don't know, in one sense of the word “meaning”, what his actions mean’ (110).

Then, there is ‘maker-meaning’. ‘To grasp the maker-meaning of the object’, say, the Lascaux cave paintings, ‘I must grasp the act-meaning of the action of making the object’ (111).

As well, there is ‘social practice-meaning’. ‘By the social practice-meaning of some work,’ Wolterstorff explains, ‘I mean the significance it has when engaged by the public in accord with some extant social practice’ (112).

There then come the more familiar ‘verbal meaning’ and ‘illocutionary meaning’. ‘The words and sentences of a literary text have a meaning in the Language; call such meaning, verbal meaning’. Furthermore, ‘almost always the sentences of a literary text are employed by the author to perform what speech-act theory calls illocutionary actions: assertions, commands, questions, and so forth. Call that the illocutionary meaning of the sentences’ (117).

Also, as Wolterstorff had already argued for in Works and Worlds of Art, ‘some work of fiction invites us to imagine the projected world of that work….To distinguish it from verbal meaning and illocutionary meaning, one might call it the projected-world meaning of the work’ (117).

And finally, to complete the catalogue of ‘meanings’: ‘Works of the arts often symbolize one thing and another; in doing so they have symbolic meaning’ (117).

In the second half of his book, Wolterstorff applies the theoretical apparatus he has constructed in the first to the analysis of five kinds, or genres, if you will, of art, four of which are, he claims, unjustifiably ignored by philosophers of art, under the influence of the fallacious grand narrative. It is this part of his book that, I think, will have the greatest impact on the discipline.

Wolterstorff begins with an art he has dealt with previously, that is, memorial art. In what he calls the world of memorial art: ‘Its central organizing activity is not a mode of public engagement with works of art but is, instead, a certain mode of making, performing, and dedicating some work so as thereby to memorially honor some person or event from the past’ (123).

Art for veneration is Wolterstorff's next concern. He concentrates for the most part, here, on the medieval conflict between the iconoclasts and the iconophiles. And what is so fascinating, indeed surprising about his discussion, at least for me, is how much philosophical substance Wolterstorff manages to extract from this historical event, so seemingly irrelevant to present or recent concerns in the philosophy of art. One engages an icon with veneration not, it is clear, in the manner of engaging a Monet in the Louvre. ‘To engage an icon veneratively is implicitly to treat it with a certain sort of honor; but it is obviously not the sort of honor appropriate to Christ or to a saint’ (179).

It turns out, in the event, that the veneration of icons, and the dispute it created around the eighth century AD, between iconophiles and iconoclasts, implies a host of metaphysical complications that Wolterstorff brilliantly teases out. But one must read his account to appreciate these complexities. I must content myself here with presenting Wolterstorff's conclusion, based upon the concept he adduces of standing in for. Thus, ‘the photograph stands in for one's mother, the icon for the saint, the flag for the country. The function of the image is to stand in for the person represented’ (193).

Turning then to what he terms ‘social protest art’, Wolterstorff characterizes it as ‘art created to energize and give expression to protest against social injustice’ (196). And he distinguishes five ‘phases’ (as he calls them) in social justice movements: awakening to the injustice; emotional engagement in the form of empathy for the victims of the injustice; social justice analysis and critique of the social injustice; activation towards remedy; and bringing pressure to bear in the interest of remedying the injustice.

The centerpiece of Wolterstorff's discussion is Uncle Tom's Cabin (although there is a brief chapter on the work of Käthe Kollwitz as well). And in that discussion Wolterstorff stoutly defends the novel against the charge that Uncle Tom is an ‘Uncle Tom’; ‘what cannot be argued is that Tom was an “Uncle Tom” eager to please the whites around him. Tom is a moral hero’ (224).

Of course Wolterstorff's major concern is with the novel as an instrument of social protest. And of it, as such, he writes (and I dare say this is the commonly held view): ‘Uncle Tom's Cabin is the most effective piece of social protest literature ever written’ (220). He concludes, though, that: ‘Whether it should be included in the literary canon is a different matter that is not here my concern’ (229). However, it is worth considering the ‘different matter’ at least briefly. It is my concern.

To be included in the literary canon is, I take it, to be counted as a great or at least an outstanding work of literary art: in the present discussion, a great or an outstanding novel. Can a social protest novel be a great or an outstanding novel? Does being the novel that ‘is the most effective piece of social protest literature ever written’ make Uncle Tom’s Cabin a great or at least an outstanding novel?

I am opening up a subject that would require at least a full-length essay, or perhaps a book to deal with adequately. All I can do here is muddy the waters a bit.

One's first reaction, at least my first reaction, is that the most effective social protest novel must be at least an outstanding enough novel to be in the canon. After all, David Copperfield, in the canon, is a social protest novel: the mistreatment of children in his time one of Dickens' favorite targets. Bleak House, in the canon, is a social protest novel: debtor's prison and the law courts its target. And Eric Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, in the canon, is a social protest novel, assuming war is a social ill, being perhaps the greatest anti-war novel in recent memory. All are in the canon. Why then should not be Uncle Tom's Cabin, the most effective social protest novel ever written? It was a more effective social protest novel than David Copperfield, Bleak House, or All Quiet on the Western Front, all three social protest novels.

Wolterstorff calls our attention to the fact that Uncle Tom's Cabin has ‘long been excluded from the canon of great literature on the ground that it is too sentimental, too melodramatic, too preachy, too poorly constructed’. Thus: ‘Given the judgment that it lacks aesthetic merit, Uncle Tom's Cabin is of no interest to those who embrace the grand narrative of art in the modern world’ (221–222).

Let us put the above list of ‘defects’ attributed by the ‘artistic establishment’, the adherents to the grand narrative, to Uncle Tom's Cabin, under the general head of ‘aesthetic clumsiness’. And let me now suggest that it is just that ‘aesthetic clumsiness’ that helped make Uncle Tom's Cabin ‘the most effective piece of social protest literature ever written’. For that ‘aesthetic clumsiness’ is part of Harriet Beecher Stowe's style, part of its power, emanating from her passion and conviction. Thank God she never attended a writer's workshop before writing her great novel, but remained who she was. So I say, put Uncle Tom's Cabin back in the canon, where it belongs, warts and all, written in our language: American. (One man's opinion!)

Work songs are Wolterstorff's next concern. And again he chides philosophers of art for ignoring a significant corpus of artworks. The common received opinion is that engaging artworks requires leisure for engagement. But work songs are engaged in while working. ‘So its not true that engaging works of the arts requires leisure. But,’ Wolterstorff concludes, ‘if it's not true, then should not those of us who are philosophers of art expand the scope of our reflections to ways of engaging works of art that do not require leisure, such as singing while working’ (255)?

What Wolterstorff has to say about the nature of work songs rewards careful scrutiny. But I must press on. So the following will have to suffice. ‘Singing’, Wolterstorff concludes, ‘has the effect of modifying the work, modifying it for the better, enhancing it; singing coordinates the activity of the workers, energizes them, and takes their mind off the work’ (265).

Finally, Wolterstorff confronts what he terms ‘art-reflexive art’. Of it he writes: ‘Among the new developments in the twentieth-century art world to which the grand narrative theses have no application is the emergence of what I shall call art-reflexive art, by which I mean, works presented for viewing in some art instutition that were (or are) arguably counterexamples to some component of the ideology of art current at the time’ (274).

Those of my readers familiar with recent work in philosophy of art will be familiar with Wolterstorff's prime examples of art-reflexive art, made so much of by Arthur Danto and others, namely, Marcel Duchamp's Fountain, and Andy Warhol's Brillo Boxes.

Fountain, as is well known, is an ordinary urinal, signed R. Mutt, and hung upside down on a museum wall. It was intended not to appeal to the senses but to the mind: its purpose, to raise the question in the viewer's mind, ‘the philosophical question, “Is this a work of art?”’ (283). How did it raise the question? As Wolterstorff sees it: ‘One of the criteria within the concept of work of art employed by typical members of the visual art world in 1917 was being a creative product of visual imagination and manual skill. The genius of Fountain is that it satisfied other criteria [of art] but not this one’ (283).

Fountain is what Wolterstorff calls an ‘appropriation’. It was appropriated from a plumbing store. ‘Warhol's Brillo Boxes’, Wolterstorff argues, is an appropriation as well, ‘but an appropriation of a different sort. Instead of appropriating an ordinary object, Warhol appropriated an image of an ordinary object’ (286). Which is to say, Warhol's object was made by Warhol.

Be that as it may, Brillo Boxes, according to Wolterstorff, like Fountain, raised a question – the same question. ‘When Brillo Boxes was first exhibited, abstract expressionism was in its heyday – or appeared to be….The institutional setting was a prominent New York art gallery. It was within that ideological context and within that institutional setting that the work raised the question, “Is this a work of art?”’ (287).

Wolterstorff concludes his discussion of art-reflexive art with this amusing paradox. ‘If a work intended as art-reflexive art succeeds in being generally accepted by the art world, then it fails to function any longer as art-reflexive art. If it fails in being generally accepted, then it never does function as art-reflexive art. Either way it fails’ (292–293).

Art Rethought ends with a brief Epilogue which can best be summarized in the words of the author. It consists in two chapters. In the first Wolterstorff pursues a threefold aim: ‘First, to show that the association of art with beauty was a contingent historical event that took place in the eighteenth century as a result of the emergence of the grand narrative as a new way of thinking about the arts; second, to show that evaluations of works of the arts are inherent in the social practices of art; and third, to call attention to the fact that beauty is a minor consideration in those evaluations’ (305).

And in the final chapter of his book, Wolterstorff concludes with a passionate plea for justice: justice in our treatment, as philosophers, of ‘the many ways in which we human beings engage works of the arts in addition to engaging them as objects of absorbed attention….This entire essay is a call for justice. It's a call for an end to the put down, implicit in the grand narrative, of all those other ways of engaging works of the arts’ (323).

Art Rethought is written in a clear, eminently readable style, and is refreshingly free of philosophical jargon and technical verbiage. As such it is accessible, beyond the walls of academia, to a general readership – but, I must add, a readership that is willing to do the work. For the arguments are complex and the distinctions finely drawn.

So I wish for Art Rethought a wide acquaintance among those deeply interested in art and willing to do the work. But I must conclude, as well, with the cliché with which I began. No one in the discipline of philosophy of art who desires to remain in it at the cutting edge can afford not to read Nicholas Wolterstorff's thought-provoking new book.