Reviews for Patterns of intention

The average rating for Patterns of intention based on 2 reviews is 2.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-06-20 00:00:00 Steven Landis I seem to have naturally ground to halt with this one, and I'm not going to fight it. I was interested in this since I have come to be more and more suspicious of the idea that there is any "fallacy" involved in appealing to intentions when talking about art. The idea that such appeals are illegitimate was part of a New-Critical move to establish the hegemony of one kind of reader, and one kind of reading, alone. In fact, we are interested in talking about (and experiencing) art for any number of different reasons; and any number of different intentions on the part of artists may be relevant to what we want to say about, or get out of, art. I think that basically Baxandall is on my side in this, though he explicitly declines to engage (at least, head on) with the issues I have just raised. In fact, his use of "intention" is quite idiosyncratic and confusing. Intention is "the forward-leaning look of things," it is not an "historical state of mind" but "a relation between the object [i.e. picture, poem, artifact] and its circumstances." It is "referred to pictures rather more than painters." (All quotations from p. 42.) What I think he is doing is attempting to read back, from examining a work of art, to the kinds of historical ideas that determined the artist's "brief" (his term for the task the artist is addressing in creating a particular piece of work). For ideas to function in this way, as part of our description of an artist's brief, we do not need evidence that the artist actually thought about them (that's the point of the disclaimer that intentions are not "historical states of mind") but merely that they were such that the artist could have thought about them (they form part of the relevant circumstances of the work). On this basis, we get several case studies, which involve much fascinating detail about the history of the art market, the history of science, etc. One interesting point, made in passing, was that the nature of art criticism has changed dramatically in response to the different ways in which the picture under discussion was (or was not) represented along side the criticism.

Review # 2 was written on 2010-09-02 00:00:00 Adam Sant Here, Baxandall attempts to make the study of painting legitimate by the standards of a historian, by attempting to deduce the cultural and historical reasons that a work of art looks a certain way (i.e. who commissioned the piece and for what purpose, how does a given piece fit into the oeuvre of its artist, with what other artists or theories of the time was the artist recorded as being in dialogue). He makes a thorough case for this approach, but he leaves no space for the meaning of a work to exceed the intention of its maker--in fact, he states explicitly that he's not at all interested in reading paintings as "texts" with symbolic or iconographic meaning. As such, he largely sidesteps the questions of interpretation in which I'm interested, and so, despite the clear style, this book bored me to tears. Likely a disciplinary issue: sorry, art historians.