Marvelous Images

Book excerpt: The twelve essays by Kendall Walton in this volume address a broad range of theoretical issues concerning the arts. Many of them apply to the arts generally-to literature, theater, film, music, and the visual arts-but several focus primarily on pictorial representation or photography. In "'How Marvelous!': Toward a Theory of Aesthetic Value" Walton introduces an innovative account of aesthetic value, and in this and other essays he explores relations between aesthetic value and values of other kinds, especially moral values. Two of the essays take on what has come to be called imaginative resistance-a cluster of puzzles that arise when works of fiction ask us to imagine or to accept as true in a fiction moral propositions that we find reprehensible in real life. "Transparent Pictures", Walton's classic and controversial account of what is special about photographic pictures, is included, along with a new essay on a curious but rarely noticed feature of photographs and other still pictures-the fact that a depiction of a momentary state of an object in motion allows viewers to observe that state, in imagination, for an extended period of time. Two older essays round out the collection-another classic, "Categories of Art", and a less well known essay, "Style and the Products and Processes of Art", which examines the role of appreciators' impressions of how a work of art came about, in understanding and appreciation. None of the reprinted essays is abridged, and new postscripts have been added to several of them.