| Phi 220 Spring 2016 |
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Wed. 4/27: intro. and § I, pp. 187–192
Fri. 4/29: §§II-IV, pp. 192–198
Noël Carroll is a philosopher whose main focus has been the aesthetics of film and, in particular, popular genres like horror films. Mass art was thus a natural topic for him, and this is one of several articles he published leading up to a book on the subject.
His concern will not be whether mass art is a good or a bad thing but rather what it is—and what it is in two senses. His two main sections serve first to define it as a sort of art different from others and then to characterize the sort of things artworks of mass art are. It’s the latter discussion that is attached to the term ‘ontology’ in his title. We’ll consider the first of these topics on Wed.; on Fri., we’ll consider the second along with a couple of concluding sections addressing objections.
• The heart of the first section is the definition on p. 190. Leading up to it, Carroll distinguishes mass art not only from avant-garde art but also from popular art, and these two distinctions lead to the second and third clauses of his definition.
The first clause makes use of a distinction between types and tokens that is often used by philosophers. Here is an example of it: the word ‘add’ contains three letters if letters are thought of as letter tokens but it contains two letters if letters are thought of as letter types.
• The type/token distinction plays a central role in Carroll’s account of ontology in §II. The key idea here is two ways in which types may be related to tokens, by way of templates and by way of interpretations. After presenting this distinction in the case of films and theatrical performances, he goes on to consider the relation between types and tokens in several other sorts of mass art. There is plenty of room for disagreeing with what he says about these examples; think whether you agree or not.
• In §III, Carroll considers an objection to the idea that only some art is multiple, that only some art has works that are types.
• The final short §IV looks at an objection of a different sort but one that comes closer to the historical focus you’ve seen in Tolstoy, Greenberg, and Benjamin. It is the suggestion that mass art is a temporary phenomenon.