ABSTRACT
Every essentialist analysis of the aesthetic disposition, the only socially accepted ‘right’ way of approaching the objects socially designated as works of art, that is, as both demanding and deserving to be approached with a specifically aesthetic intention capable of recognizing and constituting them as works of art, is bound to fail. Refusing to take account of the collective and individual genesis of this product of history which must be endlessly ‘re-produced’ by education, it is unable to reconstruct its sole raison d’être, that is, the historical reason which underlies the arbitrary necessity of the institution. If the work of art is indeed, as Panofsky says, that which ‘demands to be experienced aesthetically’, and if any object, natural or artificial, can be perceived aesthetically, how can one escape the conclusion that it is the aesthetic intention which ‘makes the work of art’, or, to transpose a formula of Saussure’s, that it is the aesthetic point of view that creates the
aesthetic object? To get out of this vicious circle, Panofsky has to endow the work of art with an ‘intention’, in the Scholastic sense. A purely ‘practical’ perception contradicts this objective intention, just as an aesthetic perception would in a sense be a practical negation of the objective intention of a signal, a red light for example, which requires a ‘practical’ response: braking. Thus, within the class of workedupon objects, themselves defined in opposition to natural objects, the class of art objects would be defined by the fact that it demands to be perceived aesthetically, i.e. in terms of form rather than function. But how can such a definition be made operational? Panofsky himself observes that it is virtually impossible to determine scientifically at what moment a worked-upon object becomes an art object, that is, at what moment form takes over from function: ‘If I write to a friend to invite him to dinner, my letter is primarily a communication. But the more I shift the emphasis to the form of my script, the more nearly does it become a work of literature or poetry’ (Panofsky 1955: 12).
