Philosophy of Art Today: Calling Frameworks into Question

BEYOND AESTHETICS: PHILOSOPHICAL ESSAYS, by NoÇl Carroll. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, 450 pp., $29.00.

MERIT: AESTHETIC AND ETHICAL, by Marcia Eaton. Oxford University Press, 2001, 252 pp., $52.00.

BUT IS IT ART? by Cynthia Freeland. Oxford University Press, 2001, 231 pp., $11.95.

In his magisterial study of modern aesthetics, The Theory of the Arts, Francis Sparshott observed that while "normal science" is what T.S. Kuhn called "hackwork" because it is carried out within a framework it never calls into question, there is - in that same sense - no such thing as "normal art" (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982). The twenty years since the publication of Sparshott's book have done nothing but underscore this point. No theme in the arts has been more prominent than the challenging of existing frameworks. Equally, no project in the philosophy of art has proven more important than the remapping and expanding of prior conceptual boundaries. In both the arts and the philosophy of art, the new norm is the foreswearing of the normal.