ASEBL Journal – Volume 11 Issue 2, Spring 2015
of the arts) to New Zealandism.
As is well known, one of the most powerful criticisms raised about Dissanayake’s
crucial notion of artification (Dissanayake 1988, 1992, 2000, 2014) comes from Davies (2005): Dissanayake’s concept seems to be, according to Davies, “so thinly characterized that it does not pertain to art as we understand it” (Davies 2005: 291, 296).
In a recent paper (2014), Dissanayake cogently responds to Davies’ criticism arguing
that, surely, the theory of artification does not “pertain to” art in the sense of contemporary philosophy of art, rather it “employs a broader, more universal framework”.
While artification is, in Dissanayake’s terms, an “evolved behavioural predisposition
in members of the genus Homo to intentionally make the ordinary extra-ordinary by
means of artistic/aesthetic operations”, the “art” of philosophical aesthetics is a subset or sub-field of this “broader universal entity”. To put it in other words, artification
encompasses and underpins the art(s) (in a Western contemporary meaning), instead
of being identical with it/them (Dissanayake 2014; for further suggestions in this
sense, see Coe 2003).
Actually, Lock does not provide any clear and unambiguous definition of the terms
“art” and “aesthetic”, as they are assumed throughout his paper; rather he restricts
himself to writing that “the definition of art, and jointly, aesthetics, is unsettled, and is
sometimes a subjective matter in fringe cases”, neither touching on the potential differences between ancestral “arts” and the art in its contemporary meaning (as for the
modern notion of artistic New Zealandism) nor to the conceptual relationship between
the notion of “art” and that of “aesthetic” or to the detailed reasons