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In a series of recent papers, Professor Nick Zangwill has returned our attention to the merits of aesthetic formalism. In this paper, I seek to support formalism as an approach to understanding what counts as an aesthetic property by considering how this approach serves to illuminate identity conditions and critical assessment of a subset of allographic works of art I label 'consumable'; these are works that exist as token art objects (as contrasted with art works) only within the temporal duration of their being reproduced and presented to their audiences. I look at three sorts of consumable art forms: food, theater plays, and dance.

An exploration of straightforward autographic works like paintings and sculptures, originally created by its creators to stay as long as possible in the state in which the artist first created them, is performed to determine whether modification of works of art is wrong. It is concluded that the works of art, always singular and individual and a product of particular artistic process, would after modification, be no longer the original work, but a second new work, which implies that the act of modifying them is wrong.

A strong parallel exists between current research methodologies in the social sciences and the two most central and popular approaches to aesthetics over the last four centuries. The point of this paper is to show this parallel, to demonstrate the importance and relevance of this parallel, and finally to examine ways of deciding, given this parallel between research methodologies and aesthetic approaches, which research methodology in a given context is the better.

Abstract In this paper, I lay out a case for why those objects of aesthetic attention which are principally characterized as natural objects should be understood not statically, as existing [...]

Too often we relegate criticism of films to merely a rational or cognitive treatment of possible interpretations or meanings of the film under review. This is short sighted. After exploring the nature of the critical film review, this paper examines some of the potential vices that are found in film criticism today (such as 'cerebralization,' 'narrative fixation,' and 'anticipatory blindness'), and highlights some of the virtues of a good film critic (such as 'context sensitivity,' 'aesthetic experiencing,' and 'value maximization').

This paper argues that due to considerations of proximity of particular humans to particular (nonhuman) animals, and to the impact this proximity has on the obligations felt by those humans to those animals, an animal rights strategy as a means of specifying what obligations humans really do have toward animals cannot be successful. The good news, however, is that it is out of these proximity relations that we can begin to understand just what obligations humans properly do have toward animals.

Varieties of aesthetic naturalism lie along a continuum of increasing empirical commitment, with camps ranging from conservative aesthetic naturalism to non-reductive, apriorist, modest aposteriorist and top-to-bottom, hard aesthetic naturalism. The modest aposteriorist position best meets the goals of aesthetic naturalism. The strongest, top-to-bottom hard aesthetic naturalism leads to relativism, whereas the apriorist's insistence on necessity is contrary to naturalism.

The article reports that modern art is certainly not just comprised of ugly art. Certainly the majority of it is not at all ugly. If any of it is subjective, it is all subjective. Suppose that objective formalism is dead. And suppose that the trend toward more cerebral art and away from "beautiful" art is borne on the move from objective formalism to subjectivism (of a Humean or Kantian variety). If beauty-production is not an aim of twentieth-century art, then what might the goals be? Without getting into anything approximating a comprehensive list, certainly one obvious goal was to challenge "academic" ideals with regard to what counts as art, what counts as the appropriate object of artistic creation, of artistic appreciation and contemplation, of what counts as appropriate vehicles for artistic meaning, of the appropriate locus of artistic meaning, of the relationships of the players in the artworld, of the relationship between the artistic and the ordinary. If beauty-production is not an aim because what counts as beauty is entirely relative to the individual subject, then every other aim of the twentieth-century artist, as broadly as we can conceive of those aims, will be every bit as subjective.