# Artistic Style as the Expression of Ideals  ## Metadata - Author: [[Robert Hopkins & Nick Riggle]] - Full Title: Artistic Style as the Expression of Ideals - Category: #articles - Summary: insert summary - My notes: - Summary: The text explores how an artist's individual style is an expression of their artistic ideals and personality traits. It discusses the connection between artistic style, ideals, and the artist's personality across different art forms. The text also highlights the importance of understanding artistic style as a reflection of the artist's values and achievements. - URL: https://readwise.io/reader/document_raw_content/162889481 - Source File: Artistic Style as the Expression of Ideals Robert Hopkins & Nick Riggle.pdf ## LLM Chats ## NotebookLM ## LLM Audio ## Highlights > Our question is not about general style; it’s about individual style. > Robert Hopkins & Nick Riggle New York University > University of San Diego > © 2021 Robert Hopkins & Nick Riggle This work is licensed under a Creative Commons > Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License. <www.philosophersimprint.org/021008/> > Individual artistic style is the style of the artist. It is a feature of the artist that is manifested in certain aspects of her artistic output. It is sought out by artists, imitated and admired. It is something we, as appreciators, notice and care about — it’s a large part of what excites, interests, and inspires us about artists and what we think about when we contemplate their work. It’s often what we are responding to when we connect with a certain artist and value their work. Consider the impression we get when we think of El Greco’s individual style, Alice Neel’s, David Bowie’s, Schubert’s, Proust’s, Maggie Nelson’s, or Elisabeth Bishop’s. What is individual artistic style?2 ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hvgtx0vspjsp1y8kqm8he07v)) > As a first stab, she claims that individual style is the expression of “personality”. She writes that “… style is essentially an expression of qualities of mind, attitudes, interests, and personality traits which appear to be the author’s own”.5 The mental states that are the artist’s “own” are specifically “standing” or “long term” dispositions to act in certain ways, e.g., to be open, generous, kind, easygoing, and so on. This yields: > Personality (P) For a work to be in an artist A’s individual artistic style is for it to be an expression of A’s personality. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hvgtyc6ve03f15v9s9hjej12)) > When (given appropriate circumstances) we do not act as our ideals dictate, we fail to live up to them. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hvgv2kprtghbx60ksavwhp5t)) > If we first assume as a minimum condition that whatever a work > expresses must somehow have been involved in causing it to be as it > is, we can sketch three notions that elaborate this in various ways. The > first understands ‘express’ forensically: by examining the work, some- > one can discover what the ideals or personality traits are that shaped > it. The second adds to this by treating expression as a matter of com- > munication: not only can someone discover this, but in doing so they > are getting a message the artist intended them to get. The third elabo- > rates the first in a rather different way. This is the idea of expression as > articulation: the relevant features of the artist shape the work in such > a way as to articulate  that is, to make clear to her  what they are. > The finished work helps her understand what her ideals (or personal- > ity traits) are, and thereby also makes that clear to others.10 > Perhaps it > is too much to say that all these options are common property. Since > AI, for instance, wants to allow that the ideals the work expresses may > not be fully formed prior to creating it, it is hard to see how AI can > tap the idea of expression as communication. But in general, the op- > tions are widely available and independent of the core disagreement > between the positions. For that reason, we try to minimize their role > in what follows. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hvrmjhegh2k38z2r2aayt75z)) > Ownership: What is it for an individual style S to be artist A’s? > It seems likely that the answer to Ownership lies in history: styles are usually assigned to the artists who created or developed them. Belonging, in contrast, will be in key part a matter of the qualitative character of the work. To be in the relevant style, the work must have the right features ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hvgv7tvjkb9h2rvcpf63hpdp)) > What range of features can figure in an artist’s style and why? Expressive properties (melancholy, warmth) certainly can, as can configurational properties (thick and squiggly lines, bright primary colors). Only slightly more controversial are representational properties or subject matter (death, sexualized violence, claw-like hands). But what about others? What about, for instance, the average size of the artist’s works or the brand of paint they tend to use? These questions provide a way both to clarify and to test the positions above. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hvgvagnkdt99ycy0pp68fprf)) > What of AI? It claims that choice of paint brand is stylistic only if > For sure, expressing artistic personality requires more: at a mini13. See Goodman (1975) and Wollheim (1987, p. 36). > 14. Individual style is typically expressed across a range of works. Can a single work have individual style? One-hit wonders in literature and music suggest perhaps they can, but can the views under consideration here make sense of this? There is no obvious reason why a single work cannot express some artistic ideals. An artist can, through her one-hit wonder, realize what she is up to in her work and then spend the rest of her career failing to live up to that. In contrast, here AP appears to face a problem. Does it make sense to suppose a personality trait can be expressed just once, given appropriate opportunities to manifest itself? Not obviously. Similarly, then, for the sets of traits style supposedly expresses. Of course, if our artist only makes one work, no further opportunities arise. But what if she makes several, but only the first > philosophers’ imprint – 6 – > it expresses the ideals the artist has for her work. Normally, it makes little sense to consider paint brand to feature among those ideals. Remember the examples above: the artist seeks to make work that is luscious or calming or clean or (to extend the list) revelatory of the suffering at the heart of all life. No doubt the right paint will sometimes be among the means to achieving these goals, but its expressing those ideals, in any of the senses above, is quite another matter. Of course, what is normal need not be universal. Perhaps the artist who chooses industrial paint has as her ideal work that is of a piece with the humble products of everyday making and mending. The more integral the choice of paint is to enacting those ideals, the stronger its claim to count as stylistic. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hvgvf0ya0hpcqz7qc7hat0na)) > Corot’s ambition seems to have been to capture the quiet beauty of the everyday. No picturesque vistas for him, or gathering thunderheads, or dazzling fine days. His search is for an aesthetic of the ordinary: clouds, dull expanses, and all. The presence of clouds in his work is one way in which this ideal is expressed. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hvgvjgm5avxyywfwwyas07jr)) > What about flaws? Artists are more or less competent in certain respects, and their respective competencies reveal themselves in and across works. David Bowie said that Bob Dylan had a “sand and glue” voice — one that everyone recognizes as part of Dylan’s style. Julia Margaret Cameron’s photographs are smudged, smeared, splotchy, torn, dirty, and unfocused. And while these are flaws that arise from mishandling the wet collodion development process, Cameron seemed to accept them and they are recognized as part of her individual style.15 ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hvgvzdmr8b1e2shfx8yt0zvq)) > Now, imagine a student of El Greco’s who learned how to paint > clouds from him. Imagine, furthermore, that he simply paints clouds that way — doing so is not an expression of his artistic ideals, but a mere manifestation of his artistic training. (Of course, it is possible to acquire artistic ideals through training, just as it is possible generally to acquire ideals through exposure or influence. But that is not what we are imagining here.) In this case, the El Greco-like clouds would not figure in the student’s style, even though they look exactly like El Greco’s clouds, which are features of his style. Suppose further that the student values a subject matter much like Corot’s, with the result that, in that respect, his output mirrors that of Corot, except that his clouds look like El Greco’s. AI allows the fact that the student painted clouds to be stylistic, while the way they are painted is not. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hvgvp13f58sgwhzvpjb6smk1)) > elsewhere: it also adds a raw energy to the message of protest his lyrics convey. Perhaps features repurposed in this way no longer count as flaws. Even so, this third proposal allows AI to explain how features that at least at first blush look like flaws can get to be stylistic. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hvgw4bw4d0ap5tbxrackzmpv)) > AI might seem to face the converse challenge: can it allow any flaws > to count? AI holds that a flaw is stylistic only if it expresses the artist’s artistic ideals, and it is odd to think that a flaw might feature among an artist’s ideals. However, we see three ways in which AI can allow flaws to count. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hvgw1fmnftt6b16y29mqa6wz)) > First, works can express the artist’s ideals not by exhibiting the > features those ideals valorize, but by aiming to exhibit them. The artist aims for F-work, fails, but at least creates work with a feature that reveals that F-ness was the goal. Such features might be part of style, conceived as the expression of ideals, if someone can work out what the aim was on the basis of the work. And such features might be flaws — they reflect the aspiration to give the work merits but are not themselves merits; and, insofar as failure is bad, are indeed defects. Second, an ideal is a set of concerns, and a set of concerns is identified as much by what it leaves out as by what it includes. The work can thus express an artist’s ideals in part by those values she has not chosen to strive to attain, and those flaws she has not bothered to eradicate. (The roughness of Dylan’s singing in part reflects his passionate focus on the lyrics.) What’s out matters as much as what’s in, so weaknesses can express ideals as surely as strengths. But note that this second move allows flaws to be elements in style, provided they are present through neglect, not mere incompetence. If an artist was simply incapable of improving their work in a certain respect, the resulting flaw does not reflect their artistic ideals in any interesting way, and so cannot form part of their style. Finally, flaws can be retained, not through neglect but through deliberate preservation. Rather than simply devoting energies elsewhere, the artist may adjust other features so as to provide a context in which the flaw makes a positive contribution. Surely this is the story with Dylan’s singing. Its roughness not only shows that his attention is ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hvgw3xzdd32asy0wht06gv1m)) > Let’s assume that style does impose limits on the range of media > across which an artist can work. The assumption is not gratuitous: consider how difficult it is to imagine a painting or sculpture in Henry James’s individual artistic style, or a novel in Picasso’s. The difficulty does not suggest that such works are impossible, but it suggests that style imposes stricter expressive limits than P allows. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hvgwbpqyak8e3cdmc3y12dgf)) > Yet Constitution also requires an answer. We criticize budding artists precisely for their failure to have yet developed a style. That criticism makes no sense unless what they fail to develop would have positive artistic value. An account of style should capture what that value is.19 ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hvrnm8sdp29kz6rvw9qyypwr)) > Marvelous Images ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hvrqjjbchsca92th9s6k9gwh))