The Virtues of Art-making: A Virtue Theory of Artistic Production

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In recent years, virtue theories of ethics have proliferated, and the merits of virtue theories for epistemology have begun to be explored. Following on this work, there have been very few attempts at producing a virtue theory of art. It seems, though, that virtue theories are especially well suited to aesthetics; Aristotle mentions arts as a partial analog of ethics in the Nichomachean Ethics, and the artist must clearly be concerned with excellence. Taking off from hints in Aristotle, the discussion of the virtue of creativity in Christine Swanton’s Virtue Ethics, and especially Iris Murdoch’s work on the virtue of “perfection,” I’ll lay out a basic virtue aesthetic which will, in contrast to most aesthetics, focus on the producer rather than the consumer of art. In brief, the artist is the individual who aims at producing the most perfect product, pursuing perfection beyond any practical end. Looking at perfection as the essence of art will illuminate the definition and common use of the word “art,” including it’s metaphorical uses. Further, the use of terms like “work of art,” will be shown to be cohesive with the notion of perfection and perfectionism, and this common use will assume an intention or state of character in the artist. By exploring this state of character, and it’s relation to works, a virtue theory may be of benefit in both evaluative and ontological problems in aesthetics.

Stream: Arts Theory and Criticism

Paper: A paper has not yet been submitted.

My doctoral thesis was an exploration of the idea, in Pico, Milton, Blake, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, that humans are tasked with creating themselves. My first published work was on the creation of identities in the on-line world, in MIT Press' High Noon on the Electronic Frontier. Outside of the academy, I'm an award-winning film reviewer and filmmaker, and author of a number of published short stories. Currently, I teach at Stony Brook's Manhattan graduate program in Philosophy of Art, and am working on the question of the creation of worlds in art and the effect of neural interface technologies and mechanical prostheses on identity and self realization.