ABSTRACT
Philosophical accounts of single arts are fewer and less prestigious, at the moment, than definitions of art in general (or of related global concepts like fiction) or of particular genres or aesthetic modes (e.g., classical music, rock, the magic trick). Part of the reason, I suggest, is that the kind of broad boundary-drawing required to define arts, such as sculpture, painting, music, and so forth, sits uncomfortably between logical definition and empirical generalization. Sculpture, in particular, has elicited numerous attempts to define it over its history, attempts that in several cases have led to conceptual clarification in other directions (e.g., Lessing’s 1766 book Laocoon); but it seems like an unpromising concept to define. A sculpture is obviously a three-dimensional artwork; but this is too broad, for every physical object is a candidate sculpture (it won’t do to draw the line at living things, or natural formations, for there are “living” and “found” sculptures). Is a definition of sculpture mere empirical bookkeeping? A conventionalist catalog of “things people have called sculpture”?
This essay proceeds to isolate what would be needed to make a relevant definition of sculpture, namely a concept of “three-dimensional form”. Sculptures on this view would be individuated as possessors of a particular three-dimensional form, or perhaps intentional bearers of such a property. It so happens that a formalist account of sculpture of this kind can be found in Carl Einstein's Negerplastik (1915), a theoretical introduction to African sculptural art emphasizing this art’s sophistication, and on the side of method rejecting any psychological or experiential account of sculpture, and substituting for it a concept of “cubic form” applicable to genuine sculptures but (apparently) not to non-sculptural three-dimensional objects. Einstein’s discussion of cubic form has some interesting parallels with period attempts to free mathematical definition of psychological interpolations; while this might seem a counterintuitive thing to demand in the domain of art, “cubic form” can teach us much about the possibility of philosophical definition in aesthetics, and even about the role played by sculpture in the metaphysical debates over substance and the distinction between form and matter.
