What are the three main movements in contemporary art?

Can anyone explain Wollheim's three approaches to the definition of art to me?

• I am interested in the philosophy of art, particularly in aesthetics and the definition and evaluation methods within art. I have come across something that is of particular interest to me, but I'm having a little trouble with it. In Wollheim's book "Art and its Objects", Essay VI, he distinguishes three approaches to the definition of art (after first effectively saying that defining and evaluating art has always been tricky). These approaches are: The Realist - aesthetic quality is an absolute value independent of any Human view. The Objectivist - aesthetic quality is an absolute value, but is dependent on Human experience. The Relativist - aesthetic quality is not an absolute value, but depends on, and varies with, the Human experiences of different Humans. Can anyone please explain these to me in simpler terms with examples? When I read it I understand it but when I try to explain it, I can't - it stops making sense and I find that I can't work it out in my head anymore. Links to sources would be a bonus please. Thanks :)

• Answer:

  Art And Its Objects contains what is widely regarded as Wollheim's major philosophical contribution, which he designated "seeing in". We see an object in the paint with which a surface is marked, rather than simply seeing the marks. This he regarded as a primitive human ability; it is exercised when we see faces in clouds, for example, or, as Leonardo noticed, landscapes in the stains on a wall. But pictorial perception is a more complex achievement, since what we see in a painting was intended by the artist, who organised the surface in order that viewers should grasp what was meant in putting it there. In Painting As An Art, Wollheim cautions against taking the idea of intention in too narrow or limited a way. "At least in the context of art," he writes, "intention must be taken to include desires, beliefs, emotions, commitments, wishes." The viewer will infer the intention from the way the painting looks, and this, Wollheim believed, "presupposes a universal human nature in which artist and audience share". This notwithstanding, paintings do not instantly disclose their meanings; and Wollheim has left us an amusing description of his own method of looking at paintings: "I evolved a way of looking at paintings which was massively time consuming and deeply rewarding. For I came to recognise that it often took the first hour or so in front of a painting for stray associations or motivated misperceptions to settle down, and it was only then, with the same amount of time or more to spend looking at it, that the picture could be relied upon to disclose itself as it was. I noticed that I became an object of suspicion to passers-by, and so did the picture that I was looking at." Though he disclaimed any intention of psychoanalysing works of art, many of the remarkable interpretations in Painting As An Art seem to presuppose psychoanalytical ideas. In a virtuoso reading of a painting by Willem de Kooning, for example, he wrote: "The sensations that de Kooning cultivates are the most fundamental in our repertoire. They are those sensations which give us our first access to the external world, and they also, as they repeat themselves, bind us for ever to the elementary forms of pleasure into which they initiated us - sucking, touching, biting, excreting, retaining, smearing, sniffing, swallowing, gurgling, stroking, wetting." The three threads of Wollheim's life and thought unite in this description: painting, philosophy and psychoanalysis. He argued that if painting presupposes a universal human nature, then "it must be absurd to bring to the understanding of art a conception of human nature less rich than what is required elsewhere." And he nails this thought down with the profound observation that "many art historians, in their scholarly work, make do with a psychology that, if they tried to live their lives by it, would leave them at the end of an ordinary day without lovers, friends, or any insight into how this came about." But this would be as true of philosophers or psychologists as of art historians, and whatever one may think of the detail in Wollheim's analyses and interpretations of art, he took a brave stand against the reductionisms that impoverish the way so many intellectuals have approached what are, in effect, the highest achievements of the human spirit. We should relate to art as we relate to one another. He felt that the views on human nature that emerged in Painting As An Art made explicit "the common ground in which the two deepest commitments of my life - the love of painting and devotion to the cause of socialism - are rooted". The way in which painting and socialism are, in his words, "locked together" was never entirely explained. http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/2003/nov/05/guardianobituaries.booksobituaries