Art

Is perfume an art

There are several ways of

There are several ways of taking your question. One might respond by asking "Has our culture treated perfume as art?" -- but the answer there is No; and I assume that you already know that. If you're asking philosophers this question, you might also be asking something historical. "Do philosophers today speak of perfume as an art?" I think the answer there is also No. Traditionally, philosophers of art have required art objects to be more complex things than whiffs of perfume are. But you may be asking a third question, "Should philosophers speak of perfume as an art?" and now things get interesting. A whiff of perfume doesn't inspire the same type of reflective response that paintings, films, and poems do. And yet it can be reacted to as beautiful (or the opposite); it can inspire debates about personal taste and objective value; it figures in complex relations between human beings. In these respects it at least shares several traits with art objects. Is it just the ordinariness of perfume that has...

I recently saw "Gone Girl" (spoiler alert!) and have been reading articles about the portrayal of its female antagonist, who is manipulative and psychotic. Some argue that this portrayal is problematic, since it plays into misogynistic stereotypes about women. In response, others argue that while such pernicious stereotypes do exist, it must surely be permissible to create a character who is both female and psychotic--indeed, to insist that this character type just can't exist would be sexist itself. Both arguments seem plausible to me, but I'm not sure how to reconcile them. Yes, it's bad to perpetuate negative stereotypes. At the same time, we must have some freedom to create characters that exemplify such stereotypes. Women are sometimes psychotic--we should be able to write about that. But then it seems like we never have justification to criticize any fiction at all, since this kind of defense may always be invoked in any particular case.

I think it's hard to answer this question without going into the details of particular narrative or representational works. It's an important question, but maybe not one for which a decisive philosophical answer is possible. Let me point to one step in your message. You write of creating "characters that exemplify such stereotypes. Women are sometimes psychotic"; and so on. Now, in the step from the first of these sentences to the next, you show that you are using "stereotypes" as identical with "generalizations." It's true that many general statements one could say about women (or about any other group you choose to think about) are sometimes instantiated. Philosophy professors are sometimes self-obsessed; therefore, someone writing a screenplay about a philosophy professor (not as glamorous as the screenplay to "Gone Girl," I grant you) should be free to make that character self-obsessed. But these feel like different cases, don't they? I think the reason is that a stereotype is not...