Episode 107, 'The Ethics of Art' with Daisy Dixon (Part II - Further Analysis and Discussion)
The Panpsycast Philosophy Podcast
Jack Symes | Andrew Horton, Oliver Marley, and Rose de Castellane
4.8 • 612 Ratings
🗓️ 22 May 2022
⏱️ 37 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Introduction
Art is created by people, but people are fallible. When the art we love is tainted by the brush of an artist's biography, we must ask whether the shift in our aesthetic experience is reasonable. One might also wonder whether artworks can do wrong in and of themselves. If artworks can be intended as conveyers of truth, can they convey falsehoods or – more awkwardly – lies? These aren't just conceptual problems. If artworks lie and immoral artists are inseparable from their artworks, how should we respond? Should we censor all art, some art, or no art at all?
In this episode, we'll be discussing the ethics of art with Cambridge University's Dr Daisy Dixon. Dixon's work, which explores the nature of (and responses to) unethical art, invites us to place art within its context – to consider artworks in relation to their artists, truth-functionality in relation to an artwork's surroundings, and dangerous artworks in relation to their curation. If we do so, says Dixon, we'll not only gain a better understanding of art but how we can bring about a better world.
Contents
Part I. Time
Part II. Further Analysis and Discussion
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | We reference some sensitive material in this episode. |
| 0:03.2 | There's not much detail that some listeners may find the content upsetting. |
| 0:06.7 | I hope you enjoy the show. |
| 0:08.1 | Pan, pan analysis and discussion. So, Daisy, to begin part two, we're going to dive |
| 0:35.3 | into the question of lying and art and whether artworks can lie. |
| 0:40.9 | One good example you use is Klein's leap into the void, which shows the artist supposedly throwing himself off a roof, unprotected from the concrete below. |
| 0:50.0 | You say, Daisy, that leap into the void can be reasonably accused of a surface-level lie. |
| 0:54.5 | Are there any other ways in which an artwork might convey truth and falsity? |
| 0:59.1 | The question of whether art can lie is, at least in the philosophical literature, quite a new one. |
| 1:04.7 | There wasn't a huge amount written on it, at least in the analytic tradition. |
| 1:08.4 | There wasn't really anything. |
| 1:09.8 | So in my paper, |
| 1:12.0 | I don't establish the sort of stronger claim that artworks can lie in the first place. |
| 1:17.5 | Because to do that, you'd show that artworks express truth of valuable claims. They tend to be |
| 1:23.6 | identified with propositions. The idea that artworks express propositions is controversial. |
| 1:28.9 | I believe they can, but I've sometimes been laughed out the building with that. |
| 1:33.4 | So it's not a full-on like proof that artworks can lie. |
| 1:37.2 | But the sort of main thing I want to bring out in that paper is that artworks have these layers |
| 1:41.5 | or levels of content. |
| 1:43.4 | And it might be an imperfect way of describing it |
| 1:46.6 | but I describe it as surface and sort of depth meanings which comes out of existing literature. |
| 1:53.4 | Noel Carroll writes about this. Peter Lamarck has also written about this that artworks have |
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