Material Identities Book

This isn't only the best philosophical writing about art that I have ever read, it is the only philosophical investigation of the arts that I have found at all interesting. Langer, building on her earlier work, Philosophy in a New Key, analyzes all of the arts, saying on the one hand that each is distinct, but that all share some basic attributes, and that these are universal across culture and time. Each art is a virtual reality, and each art is based non-discursive symbolism, which is in turn a basic human cognitive process. She refuses to see sculpture as 3 dimensional painting for instance. She differentiates film narrative from theatre. The novel is a virtual history, where as dramatic art is virtual fate, or about the future. Music is virtual time and painting virtual space. The ideas are so crisply and beautiful presented it was possible to forget momentarily that I was reading philosophy. So much aesthetic writing gets bogged down in jargon, abstraction, weird values, agendas foreign to the arts. Few writers take the actual experience of artists into account. It is only at the end for instance that she discusses at all how to evaluate what is good or bad art. I marked so many pages of this book it would be absurd to quote. I want to reiterate here: this book is profound, takes into account the complexities of evolution, cognition, reception, sign vs. symbol, communication, form, structure, and history without ever once devolving into the nightmarish gobbledeegook of contemporary academic theory.