Just What Is It That Makes Artworks So ... Artful?

Let's look at it from a different vantage point, i.e., not whether the artist intended it to be aesthetic-evoking, or even whether the perceiver suffered an aesthetic experience. Rather, let's look at what kind of things (objects, acts, etc.) can provoke an "aesthetic experience" and if these a.e.'s are categorically alike or at least very similar.

What kinds of "aesthetic" can be attributed to the feelings provoked by (a) a well-thrown and caught pass; (b) a painting; (c) a tasty cake; (d) a dog; (e) the proverbial sunset.

I believe they are all different in their kind, and the painting (b) stands out because it is not contingent, it is a free experience.

(a) The particularly remarkable sporting feat can only have one response (for each viewer, for each viewing) on a single continuum from very bad to very good, and the quality of the feat (and thus the cause of the "aesthetic" part of the experience) is foreordained by the history and rules of the game.

(c) The tastiness, and thus the basis for the "aesthetic" experience of the cake, is grounded in the physical appetite of eating, conditioned by the eater's experiences and food and flavor preferences, and is again limited to a scope of responses from nauseating to addictive, or some such range. Again, it's a contingent experience, and it's restricted by culinary history and cultural rules.

(d) One's "aesthetic" feeling for a domestic animal is similar to the "aesthetic" feeling of looking at human beauty, heavily conditioned by the anatomical limits of the creature, its specific and generic limits, one's own experiences of dogs, etc. More than that, the aesthetic experience is also contingent on the fact that a dog cannot not be a dog.

(e) Likewise with the sunset, with storm clouds blowing past, with the sublime landscapes, etc.

All of these (and many many more things in our daily life that are routinely called "aesthetic" and whose disciplines are often called "art") are prescribed, they are contingent on how they are made, used, found, etc. in social use. These things cannot be something else without ceasing to be what they are.

Works of art are made from the outset as fictions, as proposals and probationary things. That is, they are made from the outset to be what they are (painting, song, dance, story, etc.), but what they embody or represent is probationary, tentative, a rehearsal. I know that when I try to "look away" and disregard the connotations and references of the pictorial subjects, what is at play is specifically the non-contingent quality of a work of art.

A work of art—a painting, a story, a sculpture—can be anything. A football pass can only be that, and when someone proposes changing the convention so that a dropped pass is as good as a caught pass, most people would slough it off as a way to circumvent skill (or as a pointless Calvin and Hobbes exercise). If a dog looks or behaves differently, we generally think something is wrong; and when humans train animals to behave it ways that don't seem natural to them, many consider that harmful treatment. Dogs can (should) only be dogs. Sunsets? Every sunset is natural, for one thing, and it will always be red at the western horizon and blue at the eastern sky. To make it otherwise is something that can happen only in a work of art, which is free from the contingencies of actual existence and can be anything.

The sine qua non of a work of art is its fictitiousness, not its aesthetic qualities. Those qualities and the feelings they provoke come from the fictitious work, they don't precede it or inform it.