Failure as Omission: Missed Opportunities and Retroactive Aesthetic Judgements

SPECIAL ISSUE RESEARCH ARTICLE Failure as Omission: Missed Opportunities and Retroactive Aesthetic Judgements Elisabeth Schellekens Uppsala University, SE ABSTRACT In this paper I distinguish between different kinds of failures of aesthetic judgements with a view to exploring a form of failure that involves the outright omission of aesthetic judgement. Such omissions come to pass when an object of attention could or ought to have been experienced and judged aesthetically but where such an experience or judgement simply failed to arise, and can be traced back to at least three kinds of reason: (1) lack of aesthetic quality; (2) lack of appropriate ontological status; and (3) lack of aesthetic prominence. I shall examine some aspects of this kind of failure and argue that a missed opportunity to experience an object of attention’s aesthetic character is a missed opportunity to engage with that object’s aesthetic potential where such potential, although not always accessible to us, can nonetheless retroactively be said to pertain to the object in a meaningful sense also under experientially unfavourable conditions. This warrants talk of rehabilitation to some degree. CORRESPONDING AUTHOR: Elisabeth Schellekens Uppsala University, SE elisabeth.schellekens@ filosofi.uu.se KEYWORDS: aesthetic cognitivism; aesthetic judgement; community aesthetics TO CITE THIS ARTICLE: Schellekens, Elisabeth. ‘Failure as Omission: Missed Opportunities and Retroactive Aesthetic Judgements.’ Estetika: The European Journal of Aesthetics LX/XVI, no. 2 (2023): pp. 131–144. DOI: https://doi.org/10.33134/ eeja.439 132Schellekens Estetika DOI: 10.33134/eeja.439 I Failures of aesthetic judgement have largely been neglected in philosophy for at least two reasons. First, the very idea that we can fail when we make aesthetic judgements seems to assume some form of objectivism or cognitivism in so far as such judgements are presumed to be assertions capable of being inadequate or incorrect. This approach, it is fair to say, has been considerably less popular than its subjectivist and noncognitivist counterparts, and any phenomenon that appears to involve the idea that aesthetic judgements can be misguided, incomplete, or erroneous has thus also been deemed less compelling.1 Second, and relatedly, the making and endorsing of aesthetic judgements has been conceived as a highly individual act, the recording or otherwise of one subject’s personal experience of aesthetic value.2 Together, the prospects of any purported failure of aesthetic judgement being of any real consequence appear poor indeed: if there is no normative standard against which an aesthetic judgement can be deemed inappropriate or unsuccessful, and if such judgements only ever capture a single subject’s aesthetic encounter, then it is hard to see what, if anything, it might mean to suggest that such judgements can fail. Either there is no genuine failure to begin with or it is a kind of failure with no serious ramifications other, possibly, than the loss of a certain kind of enjoyment or experience for the individual in question. Failures of aesthetic judgement are thus at best failures for one. Clearly, hypothetical conclusions of this nature have done little to boost the standing of aesthetic value and experience in philosophy, and have contributed to the conception of aesthetics as a field largely disconnected from reason, knowledge, and the common good. Setting that larger perspective aside for now, however, this paper will seek to re-evaluate the assumption that failures of aesthetic judgement can at most be personal defeats. I shall distinguish between different kinds of failures of aesthetic judgements with a view to exploring a form of failure that can be shown to have led to significant consequences well beyond the remit of the individual object–subject relation – namely, the outright omission of aesthetic judgement.3 Such omissions come to pass when an object of attention could or ought to have been experienced 1 For more on subjectivism in aesthetics, see Andrew Bowie, Aesthetics and Subjectivity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004); Alan Goldman, Aesthetic Value (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1995); David Hume, ‘Of the Standard of Taste’ (1757), in Of the Standard of Taste and Other Essays (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965), 3–24; Mohan Matthen, ‘The Pleasure of Art’, Australasian Philosophical Review 1 (2017): 6–28; ‘New Prospects for Aesthetic Hedonism’, in Social Aesthetics and Moral Judgment: Pleasure, Reflection and Accountability, ed. Jennifer McMahon (New York: Routledge, 2018), 13–33; Servaas van der Berg, ‘Aesthetic Hedonism and Its Critics’, Philosophy Compass 15, no. 1 (2020); David Wiggins, ‘A Sensible Subjectivism?’, in Needs, Values, Truth: Essays in the Philosophy of Value, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 185–214. 2 For more on the individual nature of the making of aesthetic judgement, see Jerrold Levinson, ‘Pleasure and the Value of Works of Art’, British Journal of Aesthetics 32 (1992): 295–306; Marcia Muelder Eaton, ‘The Intrinsic, Non-supervenient Nature of Aesthetic Properties’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 52 (1994): 383–97; Frank Sibley, ‘Particularity, Art, and Evaluation,’ in Approach to Aesthetics: Collected Papers on Philosophical Aesthetics, ed. John Benson, Betty Redfern, and Jeremy Roxbee Cox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), 88–103; Robert Stecker, ‘Aesthetic Experience and Aesthetic Value’, Philosophy Compass 1, no. 1 (2006); Alan Tormey, ‘Critical Judgments’, Theoria 39 (1973): 35–49. 3 In ethics, the notion of failure as omission is far more widely discussed, especially in connection with moral responsibility and action. For more on this debate, see Giovanni Boniolo and Gabriele De Anna, ‘The Four Faces of Omission: Ontology, Terminology, Epistemology and Ethics’, Philosophical Explorations 9 (2006): 277–93; Gregory Schwartz, ‘The Ethics of Omission’, Think 18 (2019): 117–21; Pascale Willemsen, Omissions and Their Moral Relevance (Paderborn: Mentis, 2019). 133Schellekens Estetika DOI: 10.33134/eeja.439 aesthetically – and judged accordingly – but where such an experience or judgement simply failed to arise. In other words, the putative failure in question occurs when, due to some lapse, oversight, or confusion, a candidate object for aesthetic appreciation was not seen or grasped as such. A failure to deem the object of appreciation adequate for an aesthetic judgement of any meaningful kind can be traced back to at least three different kinds of reason: (1) lack of aesthetic quality; (2) lack of appropriate ontological status; and (3) lack of aesthetic prominence.4 What all cases have in common is some kind of failure on the part of the aesthetic subject (conceived either as an individual or a collective) to access or tap into an object’s aesthetic character or potential. Some such failures seem to be voluntary – a kind of conscious refusal to engage with an object aesthetically – although most are probably best characterized as involuntary. Either way, the habitual aesthetic processes leading to a proper aesthetic judgement never get off the ground, so to speak. To be sure, many instances of omitting to make an aesthetic judgement are apposite and need not be revisited. To seek an aesthetic reassessment of one’s own early unsuccessful efforts at writing poetry or drawing, for example, might not be called for. Some aesthetic endeavours are really best left unassessed; not everything carries aesthetic potential. However, and as I will argue, other omissions have profoundly changed the way we think or have thought about art, beauty, and more. Such instances strongly suggest that at least some failures of aesthetic judgement can have wide-ranging ramifications not only for one individual, the aesthetic subject herself, but for an entire aesthetic community – present and future. To establish this, I will focus on art cases where such an omission is eventually followed by the prospect of grasping the aesthetic value of the object at hand: art cases where we (either individually or collectively) begin to see the aesthetic object for what it is and succeed in both experiencing and judging it accordingly. Sometimes this happens gradually, over time, and at others more suddenly. What has changed? Or, rather, has anything changed? With the help of examples, I will shed some light on this phenomenon, aided by the three kinds of reasons mentioned above. The question then arises of whether we can speak of retroactive aesthetic judgements or whether omissions of this kind, once addressed, can be said to yield aesthetic judgements that apply not only in the here and now but backwards in time too. The idea is worth considering not least since it underlies many of our general discussions of such cases and the way in which we speak of reclaiming an artist’s rightful place in a certain tradition, rehabilitating our appreciation of a particular style or piece, or restoring some work to its deserved place in a specific collection. Our language in such instances tends to be what I shall refer to as ‘corrective’, that is to say that it seeks to rectify in the present some failure (often of omission) of the past. What we need to do now, according to this thought, is to amend that past. Although there will be little room here to fully develop this idea and connect it to existing arguments for aesthetic objectivism and cognitivism in art, I shall explore some aspects of this practice and claim that a missed opportunity to experience an object of attention’s aesthetic character is a missed opportunity to engage with that object’s aesthetic potential where such potential, although not always accessible to 4 Although I do not wish to exclude the possibility that there are also other kinds of reasons for such omissions, I will limit myself to an examination of these three kinds for the purposes of this paper. 134Schellekens Estetika DOI: 10.33134/eeja.439 us, can nonetheless retroactively be said to pertain to the object in a meaningful sense also under experientially unfavourable conditions. This warrants talk of rehabilitation to some degree even if caution ought to be exercised in using such corrective language. Some failures to engage aesthetically with art can be explained at least in part by the fact that artists or artworks intentionally position themselves exactly at the cutting edge of what we (either individually or collectively) are capable of apprehending or appreciating, and so blame, if indeed there is any, cannot straightforwardly be ascribed to one aesthetic agent. II Aesthetic judgements seem capable of failing (or of failure) in several ways. One kind of failure simply consists of ‘getting it wrong’, in so far as the attribution of a particular aesthetic quality or aesthetic value seems ill-matched to the experience that the object’s character tends to afford. Such cases can range from being entirely misguided (for example, ‘O is delicate’ instead of ‘O is garish’) to more fine-grained confusions (for example, ‘O is lugubrious’ instead of ‘O is melancholic’). Either way, some form of aesthetic experience or apprehension takes place, the process of aesthetic judgement is initiated, and a judgement is indeed made, but the content of the judgement seems unwarranted or inappropriate. This kind of failure, assuming we can use that terminology, amounts roughly to a judgement being mistaken.5 In other words, in so far as it fails it is the content of the aesthetic judgement that fails to capture or correspond to the aesthetic character of the object of appreciation. Another kind of failure amounts to what we can describe as a failure of aesthetic judgement qua aesthetic judgement. Here, some form of aesthetic experience or apprehension takes place and the process of aesthetic judgement is, again, initiated. A judgement (of some kind) is made but that judgement fails to meet all the criteria of a bona fide aesthetic judgement. Such failures can occur, for example, when snobbery, bad taste, or a certain kind of weakness of aesthetic will comes into play, and the attempted aesthetic judgement ends up, rather, as a mere echo of someone else’s opinion, or as a judgement grounded in the wrong kind of reasons, or simply as an expression of personal preference.6 Whereas the latter can be described as attempted aesthetic judgements that fail to meet some generally accepted criteria set for such judgements to qualify as distinctly aesthetic, and so fail internally, so to speak, the former amount to failures of aesthetic judgements to secure their own accuracy, relevance, or authority in virtue of their 5 Clearly, the mere possibility of such a failure in turn relies on the possibility that some aesthetic judgements are more accurate or appropriate than others, even though it does not necessarily entail that all such judgements are objective. At least some aesthetic subjectivists allow for (a degree of) adequacy or appropriateness (see Hume, ‘Of the Standard of Taste’ or Wiggins, ‘Sensible Subjectivism?’). 6 For more on these phenomena, see Matthew Kieran, ‘The Vice of Snobbery: Aesthetic Knowledge, Justification and Virtue in Art’, Philosophical Quarterly 60 (2010): 243–63; Zoe Johnson King, ‘On Snobbery’, British Journal of Aesthetics 63 (2023): 199–215; Irene Martínez Marín, ‘The Aesthetic Enkratic Principle’, British Journal of Aesthetics 63 (2023): 251–68; Mélissa Thériault, ‘Bad Taste, Aesthetic Akrasia, and Other “Guilty” Pleasures’, Journal of Aesthetic Education 51 (2017): 58–71. Again, the mere possibility that these kinds of cases constitute proper failures of aesthetic judgement relies on the idea that there are certain conditions that such judgements have to meet in order to be bona fide aesthetic judgements, such as being based on the right kind of reason(s) and, moreover, that a judgement shaped largely by snobbery or weakness of will, say, cannot be thus grounded. I shall not discuss these concerns here. 135Schellekens Estetika DOI: 10.33134/eeja.439 content. That is to say, whereas one might say by means of shorthand that in the one case it is the aesthetic judgement that fails the given object it appraises (or the experience that object can afford) to some degree, in the other it is the aesthetic judgement that in some sense fails itself, or at least our expectations of what such a judgement ought to be. Obviously, aesthetic judgements that fail qua aesthetic judgements can also have unwarranted or misleading content – sometimes the two kinds of failure overlap. For example, a judgement that fails to meet all the marks of a bona fide aesthetic judgement for reasons to do with snobbery can also fail in the first sense by asserting something misguided or misplaced. Similarly, the aesthetic judgement of an akratic aesthetic agent, too weak-willed to carry the attempted aesthetic judgement through and landing instead in an expression of desire or bias, say, might well have content that is unsuitable or unfitting. Yet failures of content are not always the result of failures qua judgement, for the former can also stem from misperceptions, conceptual or categorical confusion, linguistic ignorance, or underdeveloped aesthetic sensibilities. Nor is the content of attempted aesthetic judgements always straightforwardly mistaken, for such judgements can end up making assertions that just happen to capture the aesthetic character of the object of attention despite not meeting all the relevant criteria. Although distinct, these two kinds of failure are not always easy to tell or hold apart. Now, the third kind of failure – the omission of aesthetic judgement – has already been described as the failure that comes to pass when an object of attention could or ought to have been experienced and judged aesthetically but where such experience and judgement simply failed to occur owing to a lapse of appreciation or some other oversight. One might also think of this as a case of suspending our aesthetic experience or belief. The three different reasons behind such oversights will be contextualized and examined in greater detail shortly. Omissions of aesthetic judgements are not, however, to be confused with negative aesthetic judgements (which may eventually turn out to be mistaken), even though failing to engage in aesthetic appraisal can at times seem to involve or run close to a fleeting separate (negative) impression or assessment that the object of attention’s aesthetic character fails to warrant any positive appraisal. Again, although some such overlap cannot be ruled out in practice, the two kinds of cases are theoretically distinct. For far from all omissions of aesthetic judgement are grounded in the affirmative (yet negatively valenced) assessment that something is aesthetically bad, uninteresting, disturbing, poor, or otherwise below par. The latter are still assertive judgements of the kind ‘O is F’ and have specific aesthetic content (albeit negative) to the extent that the aesthetic qualities in question (for example, ugliness, disharmony, or kitsch) tend to count against positive aesthetic evaluations. Although such negative judgements may lead to other aesthetic omissions further down the line, including omissions to develop more detailed forms of perceptual, imaginative, or affective engagements with the object of attention, omissions to advance encouraging recommendations to others, or omissions to grant the object a second aesthetic chance, it would be inaccurate to describe them as omissions per se where the latter are first and foremost absences of aesthetic experience and judgement.7 A negatively valenced aesthetic judgement is still an aesthetic judgement. With that said, let us now look a little closer at failures of the third kind. 7 It is of course possible that such a negative aesthetic assessment (which may eventually turn out to be mistaken) precedes the omission of a more full-blown aesthetic judgement, but even in such cases the two evaluative acts are best conceived as distinct. 136Schellekens Estetika DOI: 10.33134/eeja.439 III Failures of omission, or aesthetic judgements that deserved to come about but failed to, have altered the course of art, the history of ideas, and more. They have affected not only the artistic canons we have relied on and the narratives we have shaped to explain the history of art, but also the way in which we think about beauty and the role and function of the artist. As the norms governing our ideas of beauty, art, and artists have changed, so too have the norms which govern our sense of what counts as a valid object of aesthetic experience. Consequently, failures of omission often occur in relation to things found at the boundaries of our aesthetic and artistic expectations so that objects at one time ignored as insignificant, non-aesthetic, or non-artistic come to be revisited and reassessed. Arguably, too, their relevance reaches further still by contributing to changes in the way society in general thinks about such things as gender equality, minority rights, religious freedom, and civic responsibility. Given that societies have always relied on art to explore the norms and ideals they use to regulate themselves, it stands to reason that many art-historical and societal changes go hand in hand. I will explore this argument further below. For now, however, it suffices to note that a proper account of failures of omission can be shown to refute the claim that failures of aesthetic judgement in general are relevant only or even primarily to the subjective experience of the individual who makes them, resulting perhaps in them missing a particularly rewarding aesthetic experience or an opportunity to exercise their aesthetic taste to the full. Rather, the fall-out of failures of aesthetic judgements can be far-reaching. In this section I will examine some omissions of aesthetic judgements of artworks of a public nature. These particular omissions have merely been temporary (ranging from a few to over one hundred years) in so far as our general aesthetic opinion of them no longer considers them inadequate or unworthy targets of aesthetic judgement. They have thus, from the perspective of history, been redressed. It is important to note, however, that such rehabilitation is often quite accidental, the result of the hard and persistent work of a handful of scholars or enthusiasts, perhaps, and very often dependent on the physical preservation of materials, pieces, and documentation. Had they not been thus remedied, we would arguably think quite differently today about not only a variety of artistic practices but also some wider social phenomena. Failures of aesthetic judgement can, it would seem, have more far-ranging implications than we tend to assume. III.1. CASE I: LACK OF AESTHETIC QUALITY A first reason for omitting to make an aesthetic judgement about an object of attention is that it lacks aesthetic quality or value. In other words, the object fails to afford any aesthetic experience (or any such experience of noticeable significance). Quite naturally, therefore, we neglect to pass proper aesthetic judgement on it for the simple reason that the object does not present itself to us as a suitable object for such kinds of judgement. Omissions of this kind occur for different reasons. In some cases, they are simply due to the potential object of appreciation not even reaching or becoming known to a wider public. Franz Kafka, for example, received almost no recognition during his lifetime and destroyed the greater part of his literary output. Had it not been for his friend Max Brod, who explicitly went against Kafka’s instructions and worked tirelessly to publish the texts Kafka was working on around the time of his death (including The Trial), our 137Schellekens Estetika DOI: 10.33134/eeja.439 contemporary history of twentieth-century literature would look very different. Not only is Kafka now generally accepted as one of the greatest European writers of the early twentieth century, he is also considered central to many subsequent literary and philosophical developments, including existentialism.8 What is more, he is one of very few writers whose name has become a commonplace in everyday discourse, where the adjective ‘Kafkaesque’ is frequently used to pick out the kind of slow and irrational bureaucratic machinery with which several of his novels, such as The Trial, are concerned.9 A comparable case is that of Emily Dickinson, who published a mere 10 poems and one letter in her lifetime. The few critics who read these poems perceived them to be almost entirely lacking not merely in aesthetic merit but in aesthetic quality of any kind. The poems were immediately seen as inadequate, too lacking in both poetic craft and moral decorum to deserve a serious reading. Nor did this failure of omission rectify itself particularly speedily in the years following Dickinson’s death. Almost five decades later, the poet and critic Harold Mono could still write of Emily Dickinson as ‘a school-girl […] most dumb to the art of poetry’.10 Others would call her work ‘no more than [the] jottings’ of a naive child who failed to produce ‘musings of a full grown, fully educated woman’.11 Dickinson was thus considered incapable of producing serious poetry, worthy of aesthetic engagement, and during her life was, as literary critic Judith Farr notes, ‘known more widely as a gardener, perhaps, than as a poet’.12 The correlation between omitting to engage with and judge Dickinson’s poetry aesthetically, and our later reevaluation of their aesthetic relevance and power, is symptomatic of long-term changes and shifts in our attitudes towards both poetry and women.13 In these two cases, the failure of omission is fairly complete, less a case of negative critical aesthetic assertion and more one of the lack of any significant aesthetic engagement at all.14 In other examples, however, such distinctions are perhaps less 8 For more on Kafka’s relation to existentialism, see Jacob Golomb, ‘Kafka’s Existential Metamorphosis’, Clio 14 (1985): 271–86. 9 The successful rectification of the omission, whereby Kafka’s surviving works were brought into a public sphere in which they could be appreciated and judged, has thus had consequences not only for the history of literature but for how we relate to certain aspects of society more widely. One might even be so specific as to suggest that our conception of how certain kinds of bureaucratic tasks are interconnected has partly been shaped by Kafka’s writings. 10 Susan Howe, My Emily Dickinson (New York: New Directions, 2007), vii. 11 Ibid., iii. 12 Judith Farr, The Gardens of Emily Dickinson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), xx. 13 Dickinson’s work is valued today in large part because of how marvellously it reveals the details and depths of the rich inner life of a well-read but in many respects otherwise unremarkable and largely untravelled middle-class person. In contrast to Kafka, who interpreted society’s lack of interest in his work as a cue to destroy it, Dickinson carefully arranged for the preservation of her poetry. So while the vast majority of Kafka’s work remains beyond the possibility of aesthetic judgement, Dickinson’s oeuvre has over the intervening century and a half gone from being deemed beneath aesthetic and artistic criticism to a position from which it manages to provide criticism with many of the norms according to which poetry is judged aesthetically. 14 Again, Dickinson’s poetry was not so much judged to be aesthetically bad as simply not a viable candidate for proper aesthetic assessment. That is not to say that some negative assessments were not associated with this act of aesthetic neglect, but it is likely that these assessments were primarily directed at, say, the moral adequacy of Dickinson’s subject matter or the ways in which Dickinson’s personal artistic ambitions clashed with the more family-oriented social expectations middle-class women were held to at the time. 138Schellekens Estetika DOI: 10.33134/eeja.439 clear-cut where the idea of omitting to judge an object aesthetically seems to run closer to making or asserting negative aesthetic assessments, such as we saw in Section II. One case of that kind is that of the Salon des Refusés, an exhibition that took place in Paris in 1863 and in which the paintings on display were specifically those which had been rejected as irrelevant or unsuitable by the jury of the official Salon de peinture et de sculpture that year. Here the idea of omission can be interpreted quite literally: the works being physically excluded from the Royal Academy’s exhibition.15 At the same time, many of the paintings exhibited in the Salon des Refusés (such as Eduard Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe, 1863) were subsequently recognized as masterpieces and are now widely acclaimed as some of the most important paintings in the early development not only of impressionism but also of the call for moral freedom emerging at the time.16 What makes the case of the Salon des Refusés so interesting and relevant to the present argument is the way it sheds light on a critical moment in the history of art where a number of paintings, deemed inappropriate as objects of bona fide aesthetic experience by virtue of both artistic style and subject matter,17 eventually succeeded in forcing the issue of a reassessment of the prevalent criteria of aesthetic judgement. In other words, the very public nature of the act of omission opened the way for the existing standards of evaluation to become far more visible than before, which in turn led to a reassessment of those features generally considered aesthetically significant. In contrast with most cases, then, where such processes are gradual and only dimly recognizable, here a single exhibition led to the very features and styles of painting that had served as the grounds for aesthetic omission (that is, grounds for not being seen as aesthetically valuable) being transformed into those aspects upon which aesthetic attention now became explicitly focused. And this, in turn, opened the way for elements of contemporary society previously hidden from art to be actively depicted in painting, including the everyday actions and environments of ordinary people. The transformation occurring in the reassessment, in other words, is not merely one leading us from a negative to a positive aesthetic assessment but one in which stylistic and thematic features and traits move from a kind of aesthetic invisibility to a state of aesthetic visibility. In this sense, the three cases discussed here all highlight the way in which aspects of certain elements of artistic representation and expression become discernible as reasons for aesthetic engagement. In Kafka, the strongest single element is perhaps the particular kind of angst associated with the alienating mismatch between human subjectivity and the increasingly inhuman apparatus by which society is structured. In Dickinson, one might point to the explosive intersection of a distinctively female experience of the world with the traditionally masculine preserve of idealist philosophy. With the Salon des Refusés, it is perhaps a new and liberating relationship between us as human beings and the natural and urban landscapes that surround us that comes to the fore. In all cases, however, the development of both societal and artistic norms interact, the one becoming expressive of the other in such a way that features which were previously ignored or overlooked in aesthetic experience instead become a worthy object of aesthetic attention. 15 The case is a classic example of the ‘succès de scandale’. The exhibited paintings attracted almost more attention from the public and press, albeit mostly in the form of mockery, than the official Salon itself. 16 For more on this point, see Adam Parkes, ‘A Sense of Justice: Whistler, Ruskin, James, Impressionism’, Victorian Studies 42 (1999): 593–629. 17 As in Dickinson’s case (see ftn. 14), there is a question about whether any negative assessment involved is distinctly aesthetic or, rather, grounded in, for example, social or moral norms of appropriateness or adequacy. 139Schellekens Estetika DOI: 10.33134/eeja.439 III.2. CASE II: LACK OF ADEQUATE ONTOLOGY A second reason for the occurrence of omissions of aesthetic judgement relates to the way in which the object of aesthetic attention may be thought to lack the right ontology to be assessed aesthetically. That is to say, the object is so startling or unusual, say, that the public and critics fail to see it as possible candidate for aesthetic experience and, as a simple result, aesthetic engagement of any kind is suspended. In contrast to the examples explored above, the cases relevant to a perceived ontological mismatch are not primarily ones where particular stylistic or thematic features eventually move from being aesthetically invisible to aesthetically visible. Rather, it is the object itself that becomes subject to some kind of appreciative adjustment. An obvious example is the urinal that Marcel Duchamp submitted in 1917 under the title Fountain to an exhibition of the newly established Society of Independent Artists. As is well known, the urinal was neither made by Duchamp nor significantly manipulated by him, beyond the addition of a fake signature (‘R. Mutt’) and the act of presenting the object in a context strongly at odds with how such objects are usually found. In this case, as with the Salon des Refusés, the omission of aesthetic judgement was a public event. The Society refused Fountain, following a vote of its members, on the grounds that the object could not reasonably be considered a work of art and as such failed to meet the standards set for aesthetic appreciation. However, the circumstances of the original attempt to display Fountain remained relevant to its subsequent journey for the reason that the Society had specifically stipulated that the exhibition should be open to all artists wishing to display their work. As Duchamp’s friend and colleague Beatrice Wood argued later, part of the point of the exhibition, in addition to displaying interesting new works of art that diverged from contemporary norms, was to do away with selective appreciative criteria altogether and delegate that evaluative function to the artists themselves. The point was, wrote Wood, ‘for the artist to decide what is art, not someone else’. Here, then, is a case where through a slow process of critical adjustment, an omission of aesthetic judgement eventually emerges as such. In 1917, the sense was clearly that exhibiting a prefabricated urinal in an art exhibition constituted a kind of category mistake. However, by virtue of bringing to a head the issue of artists’ freedom to establish the critical criteria according to which their art should be understood and appreciated – a development with roots in the Salon des Refusés – Duchamp’s Fountain paved the way for the radical realization that this power implied a freedom to denote all sorts of objects as art, not merely those associated with existing artistic traditions and the aesthetic habits they exemplify and which thereby evolved as objects worthy of aesthetic experience and judgement. The possibilities opened up by the piecemeal rehabilitation of Fountain and other ‘readymades’ (arguably not yet entirely completed) profoundly transformed aesthetic practices. Later works such as Warhol’s Brillo Boxes (1964), as well as many artworks central to the conceptualist tradition, including Adrian Piper’s Catalysis (1970–1973) and Felix Gonzales-Torres’s ‘Untitled’ (Portrait of Ross in L.A., 1991), are unthinkable without the historical process initiated by the aesthetic omission prompted by Fountain. Nor are such examples limited to the world of visual art. It is no exaggeration to say that the first half of the twentieth century is awash with examples, from music, literature, and dance, in which works which challenge the ontological categories associated with those artforms gain acceptance as valid objects of artistic and aesthetic engagement. For example, in his development of the 12-tone method of