“What aesthetic properties a work seems to have… depends (in part) on which of its features are standard, which variable, and which contra-standard for us.”
Walton’s engine: every feature of a work is standard (what makes it belong — flatness for a painting), variable (where the artistry lives — what the painting depicts), or contra-standard (what violates the category — the object glued to the canvas). Which features shock you, which ones you don’t even see, and which carry the work depends entirely on the category you perceive it in.
Then the hammer, p364: historical facts don’t merely hint at what’s in the work — they help determine what aesthetic properties it actually has. Your margin called it on the argument’s first page and again on its last: “an anchor.”
Walton argues with Schubert, Giacometti, and Guernica. Your margins answered with a record collection — and the examples aren’t decoration, each one is a load-bearing piece of his argument restated in your home vocabulary.
“Kanye’s MBDTF album simultaneously being rap/rock/synth.”
At Walton’s “categories waiting to be discovered which would transform a mediocre work into a masterpiece” — a work whose greatness lives in being perceived in several categories at once.
“e.g. a rap song that is made by Kidz Bop…”
Walton’s distinction between being rare in a category and being a misfit that does violence to it — no serious beat, no message, performers who don’t know what they’re performing.
“Frank Ocean, Kanye, D’Angelo — all the purism shifters stand out on their own waiting for a cohort of artist to form around them & their work.”
Schoenberg’s twelve-tone problem, exactly: the revolutionary whose correct category doesn’t exist yet.
“But what if an artist has the intent of being incompetent — see punk rock too? Or does that just implicitly define the category?”
A genuine push at Walton’s competence presumption, self-answered: deliberate rule-breaking doesn’t defeat the presumption, it founds a new category.
This author = king of caveats/cop outs FR.Planted exactly where the hedging peaks — the footnote that walks “correctly perceived” back to “sometimes willing to say.” Walton’s rigor and Walton’s caveats are the same instinct, and the margin billed him for both.
Willing to go on the “buyers journey” if you’re the critic (as we say in sales).At Walton’s claim that the critic must go beyond the work before judging it. The critic owes the work the same journey a good rep owes the buyer — out past the thing itself, before the verdict.
The paper never cites Danto, Putnam, or Wallace. Your margins brought all three — texts you closed in the last six weeks, arriving on their own to argue with a fourth.
Danto three times as the categories thesis formed (the 1970 paper read against the 1964 one) · Putnam’s Twin Earth three times, pressure-testing whether Walton’s “absolute senses” survive across perceiver-communities — a thesis of your own, built in the margins · Wallace’s “Tense Present” (closed two days earlier) on category rules as usage norms · and Walton’s undecidable artist-intentions read through the problem of other minds: “because art is a discipline intertwined with the problem of other minds.”
“The mind using sport, philo, literature, math, religion and connections to have an entry point to the importance of a painting.”
Your last margin, starred at Walton’s closing claim that what matters is experience with other things of the appropriate categories. The paper’s final page describes the reader who just finished it. Done stamp in your ink: 2:57 A.M., 08/10/26 — one overnight sitting-arc, five texts deep into the weekend.