1The earliest experience of art must have been that it was incantatory, magical; art was an instrument of ritual. 2The earliest theory of art, that of the Greek philosophers, proposed that art was mimesis, imitation of reality. It is at this point that the peculiar question of the value of art arose. ........ the mimetic theory, by its very terms, challenges art to justify itself.
3Plato, who proposed the theory, seems to have done so in order to rule that the value of art is dubious. ........ he considered ordinary material things as themselves mimetic objects, imitations of transcendent forms or structures, even the best painting of a bed would be only an “imitation of an imitation.” 4For Plato, art was not particularly useful (the painting of a bed is no good to sleep on), nor, in the strict sense, true. 5And Aristotle’s arguments in defense of art do not really challenge Plato’s view that all art is ........ a lie. But he does dispute Plato’s idea that art is useless. 6Lie or not, art has a certain value according to Aristotle because it is a form of therapy. Art is useful, after all, Aristotle counters, medicinally useful ........ it arouses and purges dangerous emotions.
7In Plato and Aristotle, the mimetic theory of art goes hand in hand with the assumption that art is always figurative.8But advocates of the mimetic theory need not close their eyes to decorative and abstract art. The fallacy that art is necessarily a “realism” can be modified or scrapped without ever moving outside the problems delimited by the mimetic theory.
9The fact is, all Western consciousness of and reflection upon art have remained within the confines staked out by the Greek theory of art as mimesis or representation. It is through this theory that art as such becomes problematic, in need of defense. 10And it is the defense of art which gives birth to the odd vision by which something we have learned to call “form” is separated off from something we have learned to call “content,” and to the well-intentioned move which makes content essential and form accessory.
11Even in modern times, when most artists and critics have discarded the theory of art as representation of an outer reality in favor of the theory of art as subjective expression, the main feature of the mimetic theory persists. 12Whether we conceive of the work of art on the model of a picture or on the model of a statement, content still comes first. The content may have changed. It may now be less figurative, less lucidly realistic. 13But it is still assumed that a work of art is its content. Or, as it’s usually put today, that a work of art by definition says something.
Adapted from: SONTAG, Susan.Against Interpretation and Other Essays. Penguin Modern
Classics, Straus and Giroux, 2009. p. 3-4.
Mark the statements below with T (true) or F (false), according to the text.
( ) Plato's theory suggests that the value of art is questionable.
( ) Art has been expected to justify itself since people had their earliest experience with it.
( ) Rather than seen as a representation of reality, art is nowadays regarded as a subjective expression by most artists.
( ) The dichotomy between form and content does not prevail, regardless of the contemporary view of art as subjective expression.
The sequence should read, from top to bottom,
a) T – T – T – F.
b) F – F – F – T.
c) T – T – F – F.
d) F – T – T – T.
e) T – F – T – T.
