This book contains a collection of 14 previously published pieces spanning some 20 years. Prof. Holt prefaces that they are stand alone pieces (which, however, doesn’t quite exclude an expectation of consistency, one should think) and divides them into two halves, one headed ‘Foundations’, the other ‘Extentions’. And duality attacks the drone tone of Holt’s opus. It is a highly provocative book; I shall explain why. It is because he advances many controversial theses.

Holt asserts that no current art and aesthetic theory does proper justice to the standard trio, artist-work-audience (I actually don’t recall any art or aesthetic theory that excludes either of the three), and therefore offers his “Comprehensivist Theory of Art” that does so, the main points of which seem to be these (unless all I get he’d consider “epiquotations”, cf. his recent so-titled paper in Evental Aesthetics (2016)). The artist is indispensable, he brings the work into being (p. 34) (also the “creative process”, p. 4), “a product’s being the objectification of the mental states causally contributory to its production”, (p. 20); the artist’s “act of expression can be seen as the objectification of what is expressed” (ibid.), and “the expressive act of artmaking as an attempt to realize a vision”, (p. 11) (also termed “antecedent creative vision”, p. 39); the artwork then is defined to be “an artifact that provides for aesthetic experience via perceptually available properties”, (p. 61); and finally the trio is completed by the audience being moved by the expressed (passim) in a duet with “isomorphism” “between the artist’s process of creating the visual “puzzle” of the work and the viewer’s experience of “solving” it”, (p. 78). Since the ‘aesthetic experience’ is essential (to both artist and audience) one of Holt’s descriptions goes “It’s a particular pleasure associated with the appreciation of art and beauty [“or better, the aesthetically piquant”, p. 88] … The pleasures, the thoughts and feelings that come in actively appreciating these works of art, that’s what gives the experience an aesthetic quality … At the same time, there’s a kind of intensity of response in appreciating art, a keenness of attention, more focused and significant than in most ordinary experiences … what is so rewarding … is that it resolves internal conflicts, with intellectual and emotional responses in harmonious balance, in sharp contrast to everyday life”, (p. 179). Holt designates them ‘resolutive experiences’ (p. 62) — and explains them to be the resolutions of the postulated constant or perpetual ‘conflict’ between this and that brain function, between intellectual and emotional reactions. The duality and its obviation — reminiscent of the Kantian free play of the faculties (reduced by one), the imagination in harmony with the understanding — runs throughout Holt’s reasonings and, extended in the applied half to the popular arts, his interpretations. Despite his claim to comprehensiveness, Holt says nothing about aesthetic qualities. It’s the (maker’s and receiver’s) experience that has aesthetic quality, not the work, “a thing”, (p. 179); the work is left behind in the obscurity of a mere provider of perceptual availability.

If this theory or set of theories strikes you, however urbanely written, as so many somewhat tired idioms, you already sense the difficulties provoked. For one thing, it reminds an awful lot of an expression theory in not-so-new clothes and as well of the aged empathy theories (no mention of ejection dittos) with all their weaknesses and attending problems — a major one of which is the de-puzzling of ‘expressions’, (“de-maze” would have to be Vernon Lee’s term, not amazing) certainly when conjoined with his silence about the affective and pathetic fallacies or … he just doesn’t care. But further and no less serious is the facile inclusion of an unexplained tie to the unanalysed concept of ‘pleasure’, involvement of which may be so ingrown traditional, so complacently integrated, absorbed into the prevailing mindset and vernacular as to bypass everybody’s attention. The particular use of ‘causation’ is definitely in dire need of explication, as is indeed ‘objectification’. That is, e.g., how are mental states, or visions for that matter, by all accounts and measures not objects, transported (probably in the archaic or base sense of entranced) into an object, ex-pressed into or onto an object? Does that have any meaning or is it rather an absurdity like the “objectified” (and perceptual features of) ‘square root’, ‘golden mountains’, ‘Santa Claus’, etc.? How is one to decide visions are ‘creative’ prior to the (attempted) making? Are audiences that keen only on expressions? on isomorph “processing”? and more loose ends.

Perhaps to forestall adversity of such comments, Holt leans comfortably on selected (groups of) precursors, maybe on Borges’ hint, by mere mentioning to evoke legitimacy of his own continuation of recognized “tradition” (esp. e.g. p. 57, 61, 85); all the same, “other symbolic garb” is Holt’s term for what he considers similar views not cast in his terminology, (p. 86).

Holt also holds and defends the ‘death of the author’ doctrine, which he equates with “the liberation of the reader” in the sense of polysemy, of wide openness of interpretation. It’s one of the substantial papers in the collection in which he argues that Barthes and Foucault are insufficient and proposes a replacement — still a doctrine bluntly incompatible with the isomorphy thesis. Holt has no doubt that “there are thoroughly bad works” (p. 69), nor any “that perfectly awful works satisfy aesthetic interest in some sense” (ibid.), and audiences are granted freedom of interpretation, they can do as they please, they are “concerned only with maximizing their own aesthetic experience” (p. 40), “my interpretation is legit precisely because it increases my appreciation” (p. 138) — in other words, hedonism in the Epicurean major key. Aristotle held that learning is pleasure, Nietzsche that nonsense is pleasure, etc., it becomes pressingly critical to say more, much more, about the concept of pleasure and then about how this “particular pleasure” is to be told apart from other ear-marked or general pleasures.

He contends that ‘partworks’, such as Michelangelo’s nonfiniti, pose a touchstone for, not aesthetics, but for theories and definitions of art, then cuts that quandry short by stipulating the criterion of the artist “signing off” an item or not, a parallel to Krukowski’s beginnings and ends of artworks (Art and Concept, Massachusetts UP, 1987, Ch. 4-6). However, if and when such “incomplete” works provide aesthetic experience, what, on Holt’s definition, is then their problematic status? Another marginalia Holt surely can’t have thought up except in jest is what he calls ‘ex ante allusions’ — as the burden of this construct rests on two of his own novels.

Holt’s orientation and methodology is to be classified as empirical. While his very sensible remark that the (has been) avant-garde is much overrated by most other current art theories and more so by it’s implications for aesthetic theory (p. 62f), he at the same time insists that infiniti, the ‘partworks’, are a challenge to aesthetic theory (p. 8); both of these seem to imply that he considers art theory kind of a generalization, the category of art is to comprise all and only artworks, an issue that has to be sorted out by handling, juggling, parring examples and counterexamples (and carries on about whether the travesty “Fountain” is art?, whether Michelangelo’s infiniti are art?, etc., etc.). The pleasures, if you will, of induction.

Further, Holt’s empiricism descends into more sanguine scientism of the reductionist physicalist brand, an octave lower second drone, when he unreservedly signs on to the trendy school of “neuroaesthetics”, without as much as an aside on the dualism built, packed, and stacked into his accounts so far. Yet, although Holt wishes to defend that enterprise against skeptics on philosophical grounds and wishes to showcase its promises, he all the same manages to highlight exactly its conceptual shortcomings. In short, this is how: the anatomical duality of the brain, higher cortex and diencephalon; the psychological duality of functions, the alleged labour division intellectual and emotional; the conflict of these dualities and its resolutive experience, implies at least three logical blunders: circuitry “activity” (deep structure, underlying nature) grounding aesthetic experience, match between two sets of garb, they go together this season; and correlation doesn’t causation make (now the opposite way, not the mental state causing objectification (expressed expression), but circuitry becoming mental state, i.e. aesthetic experience) — it’s not duality pure and simple, it’s dualism in the cartesian sense: resolution by calling one the deep structure of the other is mere naming the gap, neither bridging nor eliminating it — except by fiat. (Once there was behaviourism, mental states are really conduct; now neuroism, mental states are really circuitry fire dances. What do you prefer ladies and gentlemen: appearances or screen images?). At a point in said induction, to escape having to face troublesome experiential uncertainties (such as people’s denying being moved by masterpieces or, a case he also considers, so-called ‘anti-artworks’ do provide aesthetic experience, and the like) Holt resorts to the trampled down route to the unconscious (p. 87), subliminal “experience” (ibid. & p. 171). Maybe a bit fresh, but one must ask in which circuits the subconscious hibernates? — on or off the fMRI and PET screens.

But it’s obvious, isn’t it, that detailing to any extent (say, down to the type and charge of the electron(s) involved) what goes on in circuitry when, say, listening to music tells you, if anything, merely what goes on in circuitry, in neuro-parts, when listening to music, not anything about music (nor why music does make it go on) — what does that make us understand about music? Music is in the first place what aesthetics aims to investigate and explicate; whereas the neuropsychoaesthetic researcher presupposes, takes for granted, has already pre-selected pleasure of music. It provides as little understanding of music or aesthetic experience as H₂O provides understanding of cleaning and sipping and thirsting or as vocal cords anatomy provides understanding of language and singing and whispering. Right, if you don’t have a brain and vocal cords, you’ll not have æsthetic experiences and sing, let alone interpret artworks. So some circuitry or other is active, so what? Postulating identity between ‘resolutive experience’, ‘pleasure’, and ‘corticolimbic signature’ is just garb matching. As Holt writes, “at an abstract level” (p. 83), exactly, they’re mere representations, not facts. It’s all well and good that one can combine two sets of representations, synthesize theories, and in that way widen the scope, unify the sciences — unless, of course they harbour the same errors, conceptual flaws, or simply similar misunderstandings. Holt dismisses Ramachandran’s conjecture, his version of mimesis theory, that all art is caricature (p. 84), it hasn’t struck him to consider ‘circuitry’ and ‘hardwire’ (p. 74) are parodies of gray matter? or, when mechanics rather than electronics were in vogue, of skull aerobics?

The two halves do not ease gently together, having different character and topics. Holt having defended an aesthetic component/criterion involved in art definition in the first section, slides into the “cultural studies” of the popular arts, where indeed, like political comment, any interpretation is candy. He writes a piece each about his “idols”, those in whose fan clubs he would sign up, if they have one, such as Allen, Cohen, Hemmingway, Hitchcock, and three on film genre(s), if they are such, noir and neo noir — now he has no worry of partworks or unfinished or other subcategory art — and, like in the partworks issue he searched for borders, he here searches for a “neo noir” genre’s borders on the “classic noir” genre, and their relation(s) to realism and to reality; and here again the ping-pong of brain parts, of intellect and emotion, turns “applied” to horror movies and TV-series, and interpretation of such characters as a certain Hannibal Lecter (a kind of loon in the Jekyll-Hyde registry or a distillate of Des Esseintes, the myths of de Rais and de Sade) Holt finds “fascinating” (probably in the archaic or base sense of holding a charm). I have not “experienced” any of them, nor am I familiar with the plots recounted, nor actually would that be relevant as this is about Holt’s essays.

This half thus deals mainly with what must indeed be the down side in aesthetics, cousin quasi-aesthetics, all that normally is denoted ‘unaesthetic’, namely the problems much in the wind these days of the “pleasures” of the ugly, gory, horrible, terrible, unpalatable, also known as the paradox of tragedy. Again an ancient echo, even the Archphilosopher felt compelled to write a manual for tragedy playwrights (never mind that Eco thought he also did a lost half for their comedy colleagues), the toublesome, to all appearances pervasive, general preference for tragedy, the alleged pleasure, gratification, enjoyment, or satisfaction in the dark sides of existence (like the pulp novels, whodunits, Triviallitteratur, the sensational bad news, fatal accidents, grand disasters, etc.) — one is to imagine the Danaides’ toilsome state of mind as aesthetic experience — and here the “resolutive experience” gets strained beyond sense, it seems to me, when Holt interprets this Lecter, merciless wholesale killer as he describes him, is to be “enjoyed”, for exactly that in combination with excessive aestheticism, …….. making purses of sow’s ears. That kind of interpreation puts a rather bold question mark at, if not only, the psychological cogency of the Comprehensivist theory. Riding on an analogy, a “moral blindness” Holt explains: “Lecter’s psychopathy is blended with an intelligence too brilliant to be lacking an understanding of moral issues. Rather … he just doesn’t care”, (p. 181), a statement probably as close to nonsense as one can imagine or a gross misuse of the concept of ‘understanding’ (no need to imply moral determinism). Is extreme pedantry, “perfection”, tantamount to taste, highly refined taste, deep sense of aesthetic experience? Psychological theories generally do take the contingencies, all the shades of human psyche into account, but from that concession there doesn’t follow warrant to let them all shine gloriously, to make a hero of every blighter (as were we living in the sanctuary land of total egalitarianism).

Now to get into the gallery of just-so stories of evolutionism is a bit much for this occasion beyond mentioning that Holt adduces the mythic fantasy (p. 85) that the emotional is “evolutionarily older” and the intellectual is “evolutionarily newer”, whence “the explosive evolution of the neocortex resulted in the human psyche being typified by deep conflict between reason and emotion” (short of mentioning holon) which explains the special value of aesthetic experience — see, the brain didn’t come around until long after they didn’t have one — wherefore he deems it plausible “that for all its advantages, cortical evolution is the very cause of many of precisely those psychological conflicts … for which enjoying art … is an effective, and perhaps the preeminent, means of resolution”, (p. 88). So there you have it: Is this, as the title promised, the meaning of art?

Altogether a lively and engaging book that can bring the above and many more issues usefully up in any classroom, and the MIP is to be lauded for sending it out, while one still wants some more determined sense of what is philosophically salient, although it’s currently hotly debated which kinds of empirical inputs are so.

© 2017 Lars Aagaard-Mogensen and Wassard Elea

Lars Aagaard-Mogensen and Wassard Elea