ABSTRACT
Historically speaking, the thought experiment sounded the death knell for formalism and paved the way for the contextualist positions which dominate today. Contextualists have drawn the lesson that an artwork’s aesthetic properties necessarily depend on many of its non-perceptible properties, such as the artist’s identity and oeuvre, the work’s historical period and how it compares to other works in, before, or after that period, and so on. Not all formalists have accepted their fate, however. Some have argued that while the case of guernicas shows that an extreme formalism must be wrong, more moderate versions can accommodate the challenge. In particular, these moderate formalists have argued that there are at least some artworks whose properties are purely formal; and while they concede that this class of artworks is limited in extent, they maintain that the appreciation of a work’s perceptible properties is crucial to the appreciation of any artwork.
