Abstract
In their recent book Who's Afraid of Conceptul Art, Elisabeth Schellekens and Peter Goldie present a philosophical defence of conceptual art as a legitimate art practice with its own merits. They nevertheless acknowledge that conceptual art, despite its achievements, 'is not wholly successful as art'.
It fails to give us 'a sense of our shared humanity in a special [i.e., aesthetic] way, relating what is presented to us to our ethical lives'. '[Good traditional a]rt then presents to us human life and the world in which we live in this special way - as "second nature".' I want to explore this conclusion - and show some limitations thereof - by reconstructing the presuppositions that inform it. First, I briefly present a Kantian inspiration behind it via a discussion of Anthony Savile's interpretation of Kant's passing remark that producing aesthetic ideas is like creating 'another nature' out of a material provided by first nature.
Then, I turn to arguments for a non-projectivist philosophy of value put forward in McDowell's and Wiggins' writings on metaethics, according to which our evaluative experiences should not be understood in terms of projecting subjective states onto the canvas of first-nature facts, but rather in terms of shedding light on aspects of reality. This is made possible because our reality is always already socially mediated, it is second nature to us, enculturated animals.
Schellekens and Goldie, following Savile, assert that good art enriches our overall understanding of the world by presenting some aspects or themes from our life or environment in imaginative and novel ways which are experienced as shareable with our peers.