Defining art, explaining its value – a new book by Jacobs Professor Paul Crowther

What exactly is art? Why should we value it and what allows us to say that one work is better than another? These questions have been the subject of great cultural interest and controversy over the centuries, and are the subject of the new book "Defining Art, Creating the Canon: Artistic Value in an Era of Doubt” by Professor Paul Crowther which is now available from the prestigious Clarendon Press imprint of Oxford University Press.

[ Sep 04, 2007]  Arguing against relativist viewpoints, the book offers a ‘normative’ definition of art which revises and upgrades the notion of mimesis and extends it to some surprising areas – including abstract art, literature, and music. Professor Crowther’s notion of mimesis is complex, and holds that the artistic image interprets its subject-matter rather than passively copies it. His account, accordingly gives as much emphasis to the making of art as it does to the experiencing of it.

This definition involves also an explanation of those intrinsically rewarding features which make the creation and appreciation of art into such an important part of human experience. These features, indeed, are shown to exemplify structures which are fundamental to knowledge of both self and world. In arriving at this position, Professor Crowther uses ideas from Kant, and from thinkers in the phenomenological and analytic traditions of philosophy.

Controversially, the book also defends the idea of distinctions of artistic merit, based on the way in which canonic works extend the cognitive scope of the artistic medium of which they are an instance, thus creating new ways of experiencing the world. Through this theory both conceptual and historical factors are brought together in the understanding of art.

Professor Crowther’s book is his seventh monograph, and is part of an on-going project which emphasizes the cognitive aspects of art – especially its visual forms.