David Collins: "Art as Perspectival Sharing"

David Collins, University of Cambridge: "Art as Perspectival Sharing"

Abstract
This talk is part of a project to develop an updated expression theory of art that explains both what art is and why art is valuable to create or engage with, while avoiding the common problems faced by traditional expression theories. On my view, artworks do not essentially express feelings or emotions themselves, but ways of feeling, as well as ways of perceiving, understanding, or at the most general level ways of 'taking' things—which I am calling cognitive and affective 'perspectives'. I argue that something plausibly counts as art to the extent that it embodies and expresses a 'perspective', whether this is a perspective on the work's subject matter or, as is the case in much abstract or non-representational art, on the medium itself. Defining art in this way helps to explain why art is valuable, uniting accounts of art's cognitive, moral, and social or political value by grounding these in art's capacity to make available not only new experiences but new forms of experience, where this expands both artists' and spectators' capacities for experience and hence has a kind of cognitive value—and where facilitating the expansion of others' experiential capacities is itself morally and socially valuable.