Aesthetic Reactive Attitudes and Artistic Responsibility
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: In addition to praising and criticizing works of art, we can and do hold artists responsible for their artistic productions. Building on a suggestion from Susan Wolf, this paper develops a Strawsonian approach to aesthetic responsibility and shows both its attractions and limitations. The proper target of aesthetic reactive attitudes in general is an agent’s quality of aesthetic judgment, and the ‘basic demand’ we make of artists as such is for aesthetic value responsiveness: we expect artists to be counterfactually sensitive to the realization of expected aesthetic value in their productions. In contrast with our moral responsibility responses, we do not expect artists to be able to give their reasons for what they have done, and we allow for fewer artistic exemptions from the basic demand. While this Strawsonian approach sheds light on the nature of creative artistic agency, it fails to capture the full range of our artistic responsibility responses, since it excludes credit and criticism for artists’ (lack of) embodied skill.
Source: Philosophers Imprint
DOI: 10.3998/phimp.7086
Author: Robbie Kubala
Institution: The University of Texas at Austin
Language: English
Topic: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Art
Subfield: Philosophy
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4411444253