Monuments as Commitments: How Art Speaks to Groups and How Groups Think in Art

Abstract

Art can be addressed, not just to individuals, but to groups. Art can even be part of how groups think to themselves – how they keep a grip on their values over time. I focus on monuments as a case study. Monuments, I claim, can function as a commitment to a group value, for the sake of long‐term action guidance. Art can function here where charters and mission statements cannot, precisely because of art's powers to capture subtlety and emotion. In particular, art can serve as the vessel for group emotions, by making emotional content sufficiently public so as to be the object of a group commitment. Art enables groups to guide themselves with values too subtle to be codified.

Public artifacts and the epistemology of collective material testimony

“…To determine to whom a public artifact actually testifies, we need to think about its physical location, its position within the community in which it is located, and its role in the community landscape. Nguyen (2019), like me, argues that monuments and similar public artifacts are the speech of a group or collective. But he also claims that through these artifacts, groups primarily speak to themselves.…”

“…Not all of their communicative functions are testimonial, as I pointed out at the start. For instance, Nguyen (2019) argues in detail that public artifacts like monuments often help constitute communities and call on people to make commitments to a set of shared values; these are illocutionary functions other than testifying. As he also points out, they are distinctively good at instilling emotions, which is also not a testimonial function.…”

“…1 Judkins (2019), Nguyen (2019), Scarre (2019), Young (2019). 2 For instance, Christine Sypnowich (2021) describes monuments as designed to "teach us" things.…”

Two Concepts of Groove: Musical Nuances, Rhythm, and Genre

“…Yet, groove can be good in pop music because it makes a song easier to dance to or more readily invites the listener to dance. I take this to provide us with some reason for favoring communitarian approaches to aesthetics that are sensitive to community or social aesthetic practices (Riggle 2017;Riggle Forthcoming;Nguyen 2019a;Nguyen 2019b;Kubala 2020) over more individualistic hedonist accounts (Van der Berg 2019). Without being properly sensitive to the differences appreciative practices between genre communities, we might fail to notice the ways in which we should be pluralists about other aesthetic concepts.…”

Ethical considerations of urban ecological design and planning experiments

“…This adds an additional layer of opportunities and challenges for scientist-practitioners engaged in design and planning. Consider historical monuments such as a Holocaust memorial, a statue of a Confederate general, or a placard celebrating a civil rights march Nguyen (2019). argues that monuments function in part to express existing community values, but also to encourage a certain set of values and thus shape the community going forward.…”