Value of Art

« exactly as good as each other.

Sometimes, but not always, the most that can be said about the comparativeranking of two works, whether of the same art form or of different art forms, is that they are of roughly the sameorder of merit.

For example,Vermeer's Head of a Girl is undoubtedly a better work than Murillo's The Young Beggar , andMozart's Symphony in G Minor (KV 550) is better than Schubert's Symphony in C Minor ; but if it is conceded that neither the Vermeer nor the Mozart can be said to be superior to the other, the insistence that they must beprecisely equal in value imposes an unreal precision on the concept of artistic value.

This is not because the worksof Vermeer andMozart belong to different arts, for the Mozart is better than the Murillo and the Vermeer better thanthe Schubert.

Rather, the incommensurability of artistic value and the indeterminacy of many issues of thecomparative rank of works of art arises from the fact that there are many different kinds of quality that can endowa work with artistic value; there is no common unit that would allow the contribution of different kinds of quality toa work's artistic value to be measured; and even if there were, a quality that in one context constitutes an artisticmerit can in other contexts detract from a work's artistic value by being combined in an incongruous manner withother qualities of the work, so that the contribution of a quality to a work's artistic value is not an individual matterbut holistic.

4 Hume and Kant A difficult problem arises concerning the implicit claim of a judgment of artistic value to interpersonal validity.

How, if at all, might such a claim be well-founded? Both David Hume and Immanuel Kantattempted to answer this question.

Each sought to identify a point of view, the adoption of which is definitive ofartistic value.

The chosen point of view defines this not merely by imposing on any individual a criterion thatdetermines how they should judge, but by introducing a condition that determines how everyone should judge.

The condition secures this result because, it is claimed, the achievement of this condition is - in virtue of the identicaloperation in each relevant person of the human faculties involved in the appreciation of artistic value - open to all,or to all relevant persons, by the adoption of the indicated point of view: from this point of view human emotionalresponse to a particular work is uniform.

Hume thought to reconcile the fact that a work's artistic value ('beauty') isnot a mind-independent quality but the projection onto things of the pleasure they induce with the intersubjectivecharacter of judgments of artistic value, by the exploitation of a supposed parallel between artistic value andsecondary qualities - colour, for instance.

Just as, he believed, though colour lies in the eye of the beholder, thereis such a thing as an object's true colour, namely the colour it appears in daylight to a normal human being; so,though artistic value is based in the human mind, a work has a single, true artistic value, determined by thepleasurable or unpleasurable response of a human being of a certain kind (a 'true judge'), someone of superiordiscriminatory powers, who interacts with the work in the right way and in the right conditions.

Kant's fundamentalthought was that interpersonal validity of a judgment of artistic value is warranted only if such a judgment is notbased on anything that might be idiosyncratic or not common to all other persons.

By defining such a judgment asthe product of a disinterested pleasure in a work's form; by construing this pleasure as the experience of the freeand harmonious play of the faculties of imagination and understanding, the two faculties that yield perceptualknowledge; and by maintaining the essential uniformity of the operation of these faculties for all people; Kantbelieved that he had established the validity of the claim to intersubjective agreement demanded by a judgment ofartistic value (see Kant, I.

§12 ).

So whereas Hume bases his account on the idea of a person of exceptional powers of discrimination, Kant relies upon what he takes to be common to our powers of perception.

But neither Hume's norKant's solution commands assent.

Apart from any other considerations, the reasons that each provides for believingin the (supposedly definitive) uniformity of response postulated by their theories are not compelling; and theirattempts to capture the idea of a correct judgment of artistic value in terms of the pleasure that would beexperienced by someone who interacts with a work in a certain manner under certain conditions appear not to dojustice to the normativeness that is integral to the judgment.

The issue of the intersubjective validity of a judgmentof artistic value - whether such a judgment can be valid for all people, and, if so, what validates it - has still notbeen adequately resolved.

5 Non-artistic values There are many interesting questions about the relations between artistic value and other kinds of value, especially cognitive value and ethical value.

For example: Is there aninherent link between the kind and degree of artistic value of a work and values of other kinds? Do certain otherkinds of value determine artistic value in the sense that they are essential conditions of it? Are works (or works of a certain kind) with a high degree of artistic value naturally suited to support or enhance certain other kinds ofvalue? Some thinkers have attempted to establish a particularly close connection between artistic value and certainother kinds of value, especially ethical value.

For example, Tolstoy defined the activity of art as the transmission ofa feeling from artist to audience by means of the artist's creation of a suitable public vehicle, and he drew theconclusion that the better the feeling transmitted - the most valuable feelings being moral-religious ones - thebetter the work of art that transmits it.

His attempt to moralize artistic value, however, like other such attempts,proceeds by way of a tendentious characterization of the nature of art.

6 Plato's critique of art Plato proceeded in an entirely different manner.

Rather than offering a definition of art from which a favoured criterion of artistic valuecan be extracted, he merely held up against various artistic practices and accepted paradigms of good or great artother values, by which standards these practices and works were, he claimed, found wanting.

This was not an unreasonable procedure.

For a justification of the importance of art in human life would be best founded on anaccount of the importance of works that are good as art , and a critique of the value of art must undermine the claims of good and great art to a valuable role in our lives.

But isPlato's famous dismissal of most forms of art fromhis ideal state, the Republic, well-founded? His attack on art is directed at all three of the central artistic roles, theartist, the performer and the audience or spectator, and it is based on a number of grounds.

I shall sketch just oneor two of the principal claims.

A central allegation is that the works of such representational artists as the painterand the poet are twice removed from Platonic Reality, for they are mere representations of things that are onlyspecimens of what is truly real - namely, the archetypes (Plato's Ideas or Forms) of what is represented, which aretimeless entities more real than any specimens of them and the objects of the highest knowledge.

Furthermore, apicture is only an imitation of the visual appearance of what it depicts - it is designed to present to the beholder anappearance similar to that of its subject - and, accordingly, the painter, as such, is not an expert about the realitywhose appearance art imitates: the painter knows only how things look, not how they really are or whether they. »