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Pictorial Decorum

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Philosophy in the Condition of Modernism

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Abstract

In this essay I ask what it means to judge a work of art as failing to depict its subject in an appropriate way. I refer to such a judgment, when applied to visual art, as one of pictorial decorum, a notion that draws on ancient and early modern ideas of literary or poetic decorum. At play are two kinds of normativity. One intuition, of ancient vintage, is that a work of art may qua art be appropriately subject to general standards of evaluation (moral, cognitive, utilitarian, aesthetic, and so on) that we apply to non-art objects, states of affairs, events and persons generally. The other—apparently contrary—intuition is associated with modern conceptions of the fine arts: works of art are appropriately evaluated qua art only with reference to a specific kind of value, that is, artistic value. These intuitions are widely held to be incompatible. What I want to show is that far from being inconsistent, the former intuition can be preserved and defended in a framework supplied by the latter.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. CUNY Graduate Center and Baruch College, New York, USA

    Jonathan Gilmore

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  1. Jonathan Gilmore
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Correspondence to Jonathan Gilmore .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Philosophy of Nova (IFILNOVA), New University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal

    Ana Falcato

  2. Institute of Philosophy of Nova (IFILNOVA), New University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal

    Antonio Cardiello

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Gilmore, J. (2018). Pictorial Decorum. In: Falcato, A., Cardiello, A. (eds) Philosophy in the Condition of Modernism . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77078-9_16

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