Meriting a response: The paradox of seductive artworks
Meriting a response: The paradox of seductive artworks
According to what I call the Merit Principle, artworks attempting to elicit unmerited responses, such as horror films inviting fear towards something unfrightening, are aesthetically flawed. This paper shows how the principle generates a novel paradox when applied to an undertheorized class that I call ‘seductive works’: these necessarily invite an unmerited response in order to invite a (merited) repudiation of that response. I consider a number of unsuccessful attempts to preserve the Merit Principle, discuss what is challenging about seductive artworks, and briefly defend a new principle appealing to a general way that constraints under which a work operates condition its aesthetic value. This principle not only resolves the paradox, but explains the competing intuitions giving rise to it.
Art, Aesthetics, Ethics, Immoralism, Ethicism
465-482
Stear, Nils-Hennes
c3bd30ff-6d15-4cb5-bb7a-1a8d0ce16b9d
3 July 2019
Stear, Nils-Hennes
c3bd30ff-6d15-4cb5-bb7a-1a8d0ce16b9d
Abstract
According to what I call the Merit Principle, artworks attempting to elicit unmerited responses, such as horror films inviting fear towards something unfrightening, are aesthetically flawed. This paper shows how the principle generates a novel paradox when applied to an undertheorized class that I call ‘seductive works’: these necessarily invite an unmerited response in order to invite a (merited) repudiation of that response. I consider a number of unsuccessful attempts to preserve the Merit Principle, discuss what is challenging about seductive artworks, and briefly defend a new principle appealing to a general way that constraints under which a work operates condition its aesthetic value. This principle not only resolves the paradox, but explains the competing intuitions giving rise to it.
Text
Seductive Artworks - Final Manuscript
- Accepted Manuscript
More information
Accepted/In Press date: 14 July 2018
e-pub ahead of print date: 7 November 2018
Published date: 3 July 2019
Keywords:
Art, Aesthetics, Ethics, Immoralism, Ethicism
Identifiers
Local EPrints ID: 426835
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/426835
ISSN: 0004-8402
PURE UUID: 557f0fb5-9c2f-4314-8914-d27c59e6b64d
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Date deposited: 13 Dec 2018 12:23
Last modified: 05 Jun 2024 17:40
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