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Artistic Value Defended

Artistic Value Defended In recent writing within the philosophy of art, it has become common to distinguish artistic and aesthetic value. There are multiple motivations for making this distinction, some of which are indicated below, but a common thread is a rejection of the aesthetic conception of art. That conception received its most refined expression in the writings of Monroe Beardsley.1 There, art is defined in terms of an intention to create an object that provides aesthetically valuable experience; understanding artworks consists in apprehending their aesthetic properties, and most important for the purpose of this article, the value of an artwork is identical to the value of the aesthetic experience it has the capacity to deliver. Each of these claims has been criticized by subsequent philosophers of art, but it is the criticism of the last claim that is pertinent here. There are two main thoughts behind this criticism: first, that there are valuable artworks that lack aesthetic value, and, second, that even among artworks that have aesthetic value, their value as art is not exhausted by their aesthetic value. Both thoughts suggest that we should distinguish between aesthetic and artistic value. However, the distinction has never received universal acceptance. There have been a number of recent attempts to reinvigorate an aesthetic conception of art and artistic value.2 In addition, Dominic McIver Lopes has recently argued that there is no coherent notion of nonaesthetic artistic value that is not trivial, that can distinguish between what makes works valuable as art and the adventitious values those works also possess.3 The main purpose of this article is to present arguments for the existence of artistic value and to provide a viable, nontrivial conception of such value. Since Lopes offers the most direct arguments against artistic value, I evaluate these and show that my proposals evade them. Finally, I challenge the one positive proposal Lopes makes in his article. For the sake of concision, henceforth, when I speak of artistic value, I mean a type of value not identical with, but that may include, aesthetic value. Artistic value, as I conceive it, derives from a set of values relevant to evaluating artworks as art. Aesthetic value no doubt is a member of this set, but not the only member. I take it that it is the existence of this type of value that is challenged by Lopes. i.some arguments for artistic value Why has it become widely held that there is such a thing as artistic value? As just noted, there are two main reasons. The first and simplest derives from the appearance of anti‐aesthetic art (originally simply called “anti‐art”), beginning with Dada, developing further in conceptual art, performance art, and other avant‐garde movements. These works were originally made to challenge a variety of assumptions about art, and were later made to redirect the focus of art from matters aesthetic to ideas of various kinds. It would be oversimplistic to claim that no works made within these movements have aesthetic value, but the thought is either that some of these works completely lack aesthetic interest yet are valuable as art or, more modestly, that some of these works have such modest aesthetic interest that their aesthetic value cannot account for their value as art. Something else must be involved. Consider, for example, Sherri Levine's photographs of Walker Evans's photographs. In a way, they do have aesthetic value since they inherit the aesthetic value of the object photographed. But that can hardly explain their value as art. I have argued elsewhere that the value of the photographs is primarily cognitive. They refocus our attention not only on properties, including aesthetic properties, but also on social and art‐historical ones that their subjects have as photographs.4 Levine's photographs also have art‐historical value in marking an important stage in the development of appropriated art, which also contributes to its value as art. From the premises that some artworks lack aesthetic value or lack sufficient aesthetic value to explain their value as art and that they have significant value as art, it follows that there is nonaesthetic artistic value. The second argument does not appeal to avant‐garde works specifically. It derives from a strong sense that many people—philosophers, artists, and critics—came to have that traditional aesthetic theory of the kind that was magisterially expressed in Beardsley's Aesthetics was inadequate to account for the value they found or intended to create in art. It does not do justice to the variety of ways in which we engage with artworks and with art's engagement with the world. Noël Carroll's “Art and Interaction” is an example of a fairly early article in this vein.5 In this piece, Carroll does not appeal to art's ability to teach us something about the actual world or the ethical properties of artworks that he wrote about in later essays. Rather, he focuses on other nonaesthetic properties of artworks that we value in interacting with them as artworks. Carroll points out that people enjoy the challenge of finding hidden meanings, latent structures, and important connections with other artworks. So art is valued as an object of interpretation; it has art‐historical value as well as cognitive value and ethical value. Further, that valuing artworks in these ways is an unremarkable way of responding to them as art is evident in the practice of critics and audiences. The aesthetic value of works does not wholly account for these responses. Artworks must have value as art that goes beyond their aesthetic value. Hence, there is nonaesthetic artistic value. The argument from indiscernibles is another argument for artistic value.6 It is the only one discussed by Lopes. It goes like this: 1 If the value of a work of art is wholly aesthetic, then its value supervenes on its perceptual features. 2 If the value supervenes on its perceptual features, then no work differs in value from an indiscernible twin. 3 Some works differ in value from perceptually indiscernible twins. 4 So the value of a work of art is not wholly aesthetic. 5 So works of art bear artistic value distinct from aesthetic value.7 So stated, it is a more problematic argument, I think, than the two mentioned above. As Lopes notes, 1 can be questioned. In fact, 1 is not plausible across the arts. Apart from any other problems it might have, it is false for literature and any other arts not accessed primarily through perception. Also, the expression ‘perceptual features’ is ambiguous, as has been pointed out by Peter Lamarque.8 It can mean a feature accessible to the senses with no background knowledge. Or it can mean any feature we can discern from perception no matter how much background information is required before we can do so. Two objects may be perceptually indiscernible in virtue of having the same perceptual features in the first sense, but may be perceptually discernible in virtue of their perceptual features in the second sense. Lamarque would argue that a restricted version of premise 1 (confined to perceptual artworks) might be true if ‘perceptual features’ is meant in the second sense, but a similarly restricted version of premise 3 would be true only if the first sense of ‘perceptual features’ is intended. Hence, the argument might commit the fallacy of equivocation. The bulk of Lopes's discussion focuses on the inference from 4 to 5. But I believe that misstates the real issue with which he is concerned, which is the reference of the expression ‘the value of a work of art.’ The expression occurs in 1 and 2 as well as 4. It is clearly meant to refer to the value of a work as art, or when evaluated as art. It is clearly not meant to refer to just any value an artwork might have for whatever reason. Lopes's discussion challenges whether there really is a referent to the expression meant as intended and whether we can specify what the referent is. The two earlier arguments are superior to the argument from indiscernibles. They are unquestionably valid and their premises are much harder to question than those of the argument from indiscernibles. One could try to argue that aesthetic value wholly accounts for the value of avant‐garde works mentioned in the first argument when evaluated as art, or alternatively, that they have little or no value when so evaluated. One could also try to argue that the types of value mentioned in the second argument really are not relevant to the evaluation of artworks as art, or that they can ultimately be understood as a species of aesthetic value. All of these positions have been argued, but, as I have argued elsewhere, with little success.9 The first two arguments also better capture the motivation for an appeal to artistic value. What they do not do is give us a general principle for distinguishing artistic value from just any value artworks happen to possess. But should we consider that a flaw in these arguments? Certainly not. The premises of these arguments do not purport to define artistic value. What they purport to do is to show that in evaluating works as art, we do not—in fact, cannot—confine ourselves to aesthetic value. That makes a strong prima facie case for the existence of nonaesthetic artistic value. We can say something stronger. They entail that if there is artistic value at all, there is nonaesthetic artistic value. Lopes, in arguing that we cannot specify the referent of the expression ‘(nonaesthetic) artistic value’ in a nontrivial way, is assuming that such a failure decisively undermines all three arguments. I would claim that is not so. If specifying requires defining artistic value (rather than, say, pointing to some examples of it), it might well be the case we cannot do that. The possibility of giving definitions of crucial philosophical concepts has often been questioned. Even without being able to give a precise way to distinguish nonaesthetic artistic value from nonartistic value of artworks, we may have sufficiently strong evidence of the existence of the former. An entailment is very strong evidence. Of course, if we can show that there is no such thing as artistic value at all, the entailment would be for naught. But, as we shall see, no participant in the debate believes that. However, I think there is a way to specify artistic value. So I now turn to how it can be done. ii.artistic value specified The immediate challenge is to find a way to distinguish nonaesthetic properties that contribute to artistic value from those that make works valuable in some way or other but without contributing to artistic value. Without such a distinction, it might be wondered if the above arguments confuse discovering nonaesthetic varieties of artistic value with simply finding ways we happen to value artworks. (It is worth remembering, though, that it was just argued at the end of the previous section that having a good reason to believe that there is nonaesthetic artistic value does not require a definition of such value.) Nevertheless, it would be good to have a deeper understanding of the nature of artistic value and the way that being artistically valuable is related to being valuable as a painting, and so on. How does one distinguish artistic value from nonartistic values that artworks happen to possess? As will be explained below, on my view, artistic value derives from what artists successfully intend to do in their works as mediated by functions of the art forms and genres to which the works belong. Here is a test I have proposed elsewhere that captures this: does one need to understand the work to appreciate its being valuable in that way? If so, it is an artistic value. If not, it is not.10 To make this test clearer, I need to say something about the sort of understanding I have in mind and how it is distinguished from other things that can be meant by understanding. Understanding derives primarily from interpreting artworks and, in particular, on my view, interpreting them for work meaning. This is a matter of discovering what an artist does in a work, usually, though not always, as result of intending to do just that.11 However, I do not want to confine the relevant sense of understanding to one view about interpretation. There are alternative views about work meaning as well as views about interpretation that eliminate reference to work meaning altogether. For example, there are views that make the central aim of interpretation appreciation of a work.12 Even after leaving open the exact nature of interpretation relevant to understanding a work, there are still many other things that could be meant by understanding that are excluded by this account. For example, for any property a work has, there is some explanation of why it has that property, and the explanation allows us to understand why it has the property. But to define ‘understanding an artwork’ in this way would not help us to distinguish a special class of properties responsible for artistic value since it covers all properties artworks possess, whereas the sense of understanding I have very briefly indicated is specifically related to the appreciation of artworks and, hence, a plausible route to discovering their value in art. Let us now see how applying the test works in practice. If an artwork has cognitive or ethical value that is part of its artistic value, one needs to understand the work to appreciate this value. That is, it is not enough to know that a work has an ethically controversial subject matter (say incest) to form a judgment about its artistic value. One has to learn what sort of exploration of its subject matter it provides, what attitudes toward this topic it manifests, what it requires its audience to imagine and to feel, before one can assess this value. That is what an appreciative understanding of a work allows. However, such understanding is not required to appreciate adventitious valuable properties of artworks. This is obvious for the ability of a painting to cover a hole in the wall. But it is also true of value derived from more complex social phenomena such as appreciating the financial value of a painting. To do this, one primarily needs to know the price similar paintings have garnered at auction or other sales. One can certainly go deeper by asking for an explanation of why some works are financially more valuable than others at a given time; this may require knowledge of some artistic qualities such as the style of the work or the artistic movement it is associated with, or even the quality critics consider it to have. But this nearly always falls well short of the understanding that full‐fledged interpretation provides, and, in any case, the connection between financial value and such qualities is always contingently based on the demand for works with such qualities and the available supply. Financial value varies while those qualities remain constant, which shows that no matter how well we understand a work that will never be sufficient to gauge financial value. There are some other cases that might be thought to challenge this criterion. I consider three here. First, one may wonder if one needs to understand works to appreciate their art‐historical significance, that is, features such as a work's originality, its being the culmination of a style, its being influential. Art‐historical value is often considered an artistic value, but if we want to say this is always so, it is necessary to distinguish ways a work can be influential that do not bestow art‐historical value. For example, a film might be the first to cause certain subliminal effects that enhance the value of product placement within it. The film then is valuable as advertising for the product, but is not artistically better. However, when we classify works as original, we usually do not merely mean that they have something new about them, but rather that they possess some valuable property intrinsic to (understanding) the work that was not found in earlier works, such as Vermeer's ability to depict the effects of light on objects, thereby creating new and very valuable experience, and also perhaps providing new knowledge of what we see. Second, consider naturalistic novels like The Jungle by Upton Sinclair and Germinal by Émile Zola. They were intended to vividly describe dangerous and unjust practices such as those institutionalized in the meat packing and coal mining industries, in part, in order to change those practices. Is success in changing them an artistic value? The mere fact that they are causally related to such changes is not an artistic value, any more than the fact that The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe caused a rash of suicides is a demerit in that work. But the fact that it is a defining feature of this type of literary artwork to be socially engaged in this way, when it succeeds in virtue of its literary properties such as vivid description, then this is an artistic virtue that requires an understanding of the work to appreciate. Finally, consider the sentimental value of a song for a certain couple. Part of the explanation of why the song has this value is simply that it was first heard on a significant occasion, and the significance has been transferred to the song. To appreciate this kind of significance requires no understanding of the song. However, it may be that this song, rather than others also heard on that special day, came to have sentimental value because it expressed a mood particularly fitting to the occasion. In that case, understanding the song is necessary for understanding why it has sentimental value for the couple. But sentimental value is usually regarded as nonartistic. However, it is not clear that this example constitutes a genuine counterexample to the proposal. One can say that the sentimental value that involves perceiving the song's expressive properties has two components. One is the value of the song as a vehicle for the expression of feeling. The second is the special significance of that expression of emotion for a particular couple that is based on the special occasion on which the song was heard. The first component involves an artistic value—a value the song would have even without its having sentimental value. The second component does not involve an artistic value. So we could say that sentimental value itself on occasion could involve a plurality of values, one artistic, one nonartistic. iii.arguments against artistic value: the trivializing strategy So much for the immediate challenge. Is discharging it sufficient to establish the existence of artistic value? Lopes might object that I have simply reproduced the notion of value in art, which he regards as a trivial conception of artistic value. I turn now to some of his arguments intended to back up such a claim. For his account of value in art, Lopes adopts a definition offered by Wolterstorff: V is a value in art = V is realized in a work to the extent that the work serves the purposes for which it was made or distributed.13 Call this VIN. VIN entails: V is a value in a work if and only if realizing V is a purpose for which the work was made or distributed. If this is right, then the proposal I have offered is not equivalent to value in art as so defined. Works are made for all kinds of purposes extraneous to what the artist does in the work, or to aims intrinsic to an art form or genre. For example, they might be made for the purpose of finding fame or fortune. This is equally, if not more, true for the purposes people have in distributing works. But appreciating the work's possession of such values does not require understanding the work. So my proposal rules them out as artistic values. However, Lopes indicates that he chose VIN somewhat arbitrarily. Other candidates could have been chosen. Since he refers to some of these, one can see that not all the candidates paint value in art with such a broad brush. In fact, some paint it with a finer brush than my own.14 Given that, I infer that there is a chance that Lopes might count my test for artistic value as simply indicating value in art. Concerning whether he actually would, I am not sure. But given the actual range of proposals that might count as indicating value in art, do all of these necessarily trivialize the notion of value as art? That is far from clear. What we have been after are values we find in art when we evaluate them as art. The two arguments endorsed above led us to think that when we evaluate works as art, we are not just evaluating them for aesthetic value because some works we value highly as art lack significant aesthetic value and many works that do have significant aesthetic value are valued as art for other properties they possess. So as long as we can carve off adventitious values, what is the problem? Why should the result trivialize value as art? Lopes thinks that it trivializes the notion of artistic value because it makes too many values artistic ones. “Examples of the artistic value recognized by the trivial theory include aesthetic value, propaganda value, theological value, moral value, therapeutic value, prurient value, and decorative value.”15 One can quibble about some of these items. The important thing to remember is that just because a work is, say, therapeutic does not mean that this is an artistic value. Therapeutic value could be an artistic value of some works, but merely being therapeutic is not sufficient to make it so. I have offered a test for when it is, but is there something more that can be said that underlies and justifies this test? Those who accept an aesthetic theory of art believe that artistic value derives from art's aesthetic nature. On one version of such a theory, artworks are objects intended for aesthetic regard and artistic value is the value we get from the work when properly understood and so regarded. This would obviously be aesthetic value. (I am not claiming that this is Lopes's route to an equivalent conclusion.) The aesthetic theory is the best known, and probably the most plausible instance of an essentialist conception of artistic value—a conception that purportedly derives from the nature of art. But the aesthetic theory of art has been under attack for some time, and despite some attempts, mentioned earlier, to revive it, it remains a minority view.16 The majority view is that knowing what art is will not provide knowledge of artistic value. This suggests that we need a nonessentialist account of artistic value.17 Artistic value derives from what artists intend to do in their works as mediated by functions of the art forms and genres to which the works belong. But even those functions change, and what changes them are artists' intentions (and perhaps we should add, changing cultural expectations). Given a nonessentialist conception of artistic value, it is not surprising that a large number of values are capable of being artistic values, and that what is an artistic value will not be uniform across all artworks. They remain artistic values because imbuing the work with such a value is part of the artist's project in making the work, and appreciating the value requires understanding the work. iv.arguments against artistic value: the art form strategy Lopes has two interesting argumentative strategies in advancing his critique of artistic value. The first is the trivializing strategy, which I have attempted to defuse in the previous section. The second is the art form strategy. This strategy argues that there are no artistic achievements, only pictorial, musical, or literary achievements. Hence, we cannot derive a notion of artistic value via a conception of artistic achievement. Also, artworks are never appreciated under the category “artwork,” but under more specific art form or art genre categories. Hence, we cannot derive a notion of artistic value via a notion of artwork as an appreciative category. This means that we do not appreciate objects as artworks and do not discover artistic achievements in understanding artists' projects. If this is so, it would undercut the arguments and the test for artistic value given above. However, as interesting and highly sophisticated as these arguments are, they are flawed for two separate reasons. First, sometimes a guiding category in appreciating an artwork is, in fact, the category of art. This is often true with avant‐garde works. When we first encounter items like readymades, we want to know not why they are readymades, or even what value they have as readymades, but why they are art and what value they have as art. This is understandable because when readymades first appeared, they were a novel art‐category and, in getting our bearings with regard to them, it is useful to wonder how they could be bearers of characteristically artistic value or how they could be related to other things we regard as art. Do they have aesthetic value despite claims to the contrary? Are they bearers of a kind of cognitive value that artworks of various kinds are good at delivering, such as making us feel the force of certain questions? However, an artwork need not belong to a novel form for it to directly raise questions about its artistic value. When we encounter photographs of photographs in an artworld context, we do not wonder why these are photographs, but we might wonder why they are art and what value they might have as art. This value might not be pictorial. It may or may not be peculiar to photographs, but it needs to be something we can recognize to be an artistic value. So we can appreciate objects as artworks per se and we can recognize characteristically artistic achievements. Second, the idea that we primarily value objects typed as painting or as music, not objects typed as art, is not quite right, or is at least misleading. This is because there are paintings typed as art and paintings not typed as art, and we value these in different, though overlapping, ways. There are products of commercial art, graphic design, illustration, and so on that are certainly paintings (and other graphic works), but are not members of the art form painting. This is not just true for paintings. Wherever there is an art form, there is a broader category, call it a medium. Members of the medium are valued in different ways depending on whether they also belong to the relevant art form or not. However, all members of a medium can be evaluated aesthetically. So there must be other artistic values that explain the different ways we value different members of a medium. I believe art‐historical values, which are not peculiar to any one art form, are particularly significant here. The important point, though, is that in valuing something as a member of an art form, typing it as art is just as important as typing it as a painting. It is the joint typing that allows us to value it appropriately. In addition, if we make cross‐categorial comparative evaluations of artworks, we are not evaluating them solely as belonging in a category. We do not just lump together the great art from diverse categories; we rank them, or we argue, for instance, that the best folk tune cannot be as good as the best symphony.18 Finally, although Lopes questions whether we value items as art as opposed to valuing them as paintings, poems, photos, and so on, his final verdict is ambivalent: (1) nothing has value typed as art and yet (2) there is such a thing as artistic value (understood as aesthetic value). One can render (1) and (2) consistent only by qualifying at least one of these. By (1), Lopes might mean: nothing has value simply typed as art. If this is what he does mean, that would do the trick, without denying there is artistic value. We could agree with this view without undercutting the arguments and the test for artistic value. In the end, all agree that there is artistic value, even if being valuable as art derives from being valuable as something else, such as a painting, or a poem, and so on. This conclusion is further supported by Lopes's one positive proposal, to which I now turn. v.artistic value as aesthetic value Lopes's positive proposal is: V is an artistic value = V is an aesthetic value of an artwork as a K, where K is art form, genre, or other art kind.19 A possible problem for this view arises if there are artworks that do not belong to an art kind but possess artistic value. Consider items like carpets, quilts, or furniture. Some of these items can be so beautiful, expressive, or meaningful that we literally (not merely honorifically) count them as artworks. But are these, like painting, media within which there is an art form? I doubt this is so in some cases such as furniture.20 An item of furniture is an artwork because of its great aesthetic value, yet it lacks aesthetic value of an artwork as a K because there is no art kind K to which it belongs. So it is an artwork because of its aesthetic value, but, according to Lopes's positive proposal, it does not have artistic value because it lacks aesthetic value as a K. That is implausible. This point might seem a quibble. Could we not cook up a category of furniture art, that is, the category composed of all pieces of furniture that are artworks? But that begs the question whether the pieces of furniture simply have aesthetic value or whether they have something distinctively different: not just aesthetic value or even aesthetic value as furniture, but aesthetic value as furniture art. That they have the last kind of value is highly implausible. I believe the concept of aesthetic value as an art kind K betrays a more basic misunderstanding of aesthetic value as compared with artistic value. Artistic value comprises a diverse set of values because it is any value relevant to the evaluation of artworks as art, or, in other words, it is any value that we derive from works existing within art institutions or practices when appreciated as members of those institutions or practices. (So if we are appreciating something as belonging to the art form painting, we are ipso facto appreciating it as art.) An analogy would be religious value or political value. But aesthetic value is quite different because it is not derived from any particular institution or practice. It is everywhere. It has to be defined in its own right, like hedonic value or cognitive value. Aesthetic value can be realized in different ways in different media, but it cannot be a different value in different media. So the real problem with the above proposal is that there is no such thing as aesthetic value as a K. ‘Aesthetic value as a K’ lacks a referent, even if there are plenty of Ks that have aesthetic value. vi.conciliatory gestures Toward the end of his article, Lopes makes a couple of remarks that seem conciliatory toward advocates of artistic value. First, “aesthetic value need not go it alone. There are many values in art, which can and do contribute to the summative understanding of the value of art.”21 One would like to hear more about: aesthetic value not going it alone in … doing what? Evaluating artworks as art? Is a summative understanding of the value of art what we need to evaluate artworks as art? If the answer to these questions is affirmative, then I wonder why Lopes denies the existence of (nonaesthetic) artistic value, for these remarks would affirm its existence. But if the answers are negative, then the point of this remark is unclear to me. Second, “the point is not whether cognitive and moral value in artworks are artistic values but whether they interact in significant ways with aesthetic value.”22 Whether interaction occurs is an important question. Interaction, as Lopes understands it, involves one kind of value implying or entailing another.23 When both values are present in an artwork, it is conceivable that one is still irrelevant to the artistic value of the work. Yes, it might be said, the work has moral value, and this implies that it has an aesthetic value that makes it a better artwork, but the moral value itself is irrelevant to its being a better artwork. This is logically possible. It is just very implausible. When two values are so related in an artwork, it is usually relevant to the artist's projects in making the work and, if the project is successful and worthy, both values would be relevant to the work's value as art. Let me make some conciliatory gestures too. I think Lopes sees that the only viable conception of nonaesthetic artistic value would be a nonessentialist one. We agree about this. We also agree that some of these nonaesthetic values interact in significant ways with aesthetic value in some artworks. When this happens, those works cannot be properly understood or evaluated without taking this interaction into account. We agree on this too. We disagree about whether some notion of aesthetic value can be deployed in providing a free‐standing conception of artistic value. I have argued that it cannot; Lopes thinks that it can. We also disagree on whether there is a satisfactory account of nonaesthetic artistic value that distinguishes it from value in art. I have argued that there is; Lopes thinks there is not. If I have been successful, two things have been established. First, there are good arguments that show that there is artistic value distinct from aesthetic value, and, second, we have a way of identifying the former. Artistic value is value that can only be appreciated by understanding the works that possess it.24 Footnotes 1. Monroe C. Beardsley, Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1958) and the essays contained in The Aesthetic Point of View (Cornell University Press, 1982) are together the best source for Beardsley's evolved aesthetic theory of art. 2. Such attempts include Gary Iseminger, The Aesthetic Function of Art (Cornell University Press, 2004) and Nick Zangwill, Aesthetic Creation (Oxford University Press, 2007). I have critiqued these proposals in “Aesthetic Creation and Artistic Value,”Art and Philosophy (Poland) 35 (2009): 68–82; “Review of ‘The Aesthetic Function of Art,’”Philosophical Review 116 (2007): 115–18; and Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art, 2nd edition (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2010), pp. 233–236. 3. Dominic McIver Lopes, “The Myth of (Non‐Aesthetic) Artistic Value,”Philosophical Quarterly 61 (2011): 518–536. 4. Stecker, Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art, pp. 233–234. 5. Noël Carroll, “Art and Interaction,”The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 45 (1986): 57–68. 6. This is adapted from an argument given by Danto on a different topic: the nature of art. See Arthur C. Danto, “The Artworld,”Journal of Philosophy 61 (1964): 571–584. Danto greatly elaborates on the relevance of indiscernibles to the philosophy of art, including its relevance to aesthetic appreciation, in The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (Harvard University Press, 1981). 7. Lopes, “The Myth of (Non‐Aesthetic) Artistic Value,” p. 519. 8. Peter Lamarque, Work and Object: Explorations in the Metaphysics of Art (Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 61–66. 9. Beardsley was skeptical that some avant‐garde works were art, which would deprive them of the chance to possess artistic value. Richard Lind, “The Aesthetic Essence of Art,”The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 50 (1992): 117–129, and James Shelley, “The Problem of Non‐perceptual Art,”The British Journal of Aesthetics 43 (2002): 363–378, argue that the value of avant‐garde works can be understood in aesthetic terms. Malcom Budd's Values of Art: Pictures, Poetry and Music (London: Penguin, 1995) is the most impressive effort to incorporate all artistic value within the valuable experience of the work, which could be regarded as incorporating it into aesthetic value. See Stecker, Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art, pp. 221–246, for rebuttals of all these attempts. 10. Stecker, Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art, p. 240. 11. In Robert Stecker, Interpretation and Construction: Art, Speech and the Law (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003). 12. See Peter Lamarque, “Appreciation and Literary Interpretation,” in Is There a Single Right Interpretation? ed. Michael Krausz (Penn State University Press, 2002), pp. 285–306. 13. Lopes, “The Myth of (Non‐Aesthetic) Artistic Value,” p. 520. Adopted from Nicholas Wolterstorff, Art in Action (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdman, 1980), p. 157. 14. Lopes, “The Myth of (Non‐Aesthetic) Artistic Value,” p. 520, n.4. Lopes refers to Iseminger's attempt to specify artistic value in The Aesthetic Function of Art. Iseminger identifies artistic value with the fulfilling of art's aesthetic function, thereby proposing a view close to Lopes’s. If this is an instance of merely specifying value in art, there is nothing trivial about it. It is highly controversial. 15. Lopes, “The Myth of (Non‐Aesthetic) Artistic Value,” p. 521. 16. Beginning especially with the work of Arthur Danto and George Dickie. See Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace and Dickie, Art and the Aesthetic (Cornell University Press, 1974). 17. I have argued for a nonessentialist conception of artistic value in “Two Conceptions of Aesthetic Value,”Iyyun: The Jerusalem Philosophical Quarterly 46 (1997): 51–62, and Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art, pp. 221–246. 18. Alan H. Goldman argues that we make such comparisons in Aesthetic Value (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1995). 19. Lopes, “The Myth of (Non‐Aesthetic) Artistic Value,” p. 535. 20. Stephen Davies asserts precisely this with regard to architectural artworks. He argues that some buildings are artworks, but architecture is not an art form. See Stephen Davies, “Is Architecture an Art?” in Philosophy and Architecture, ed. Michael Mitias (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Editions Rodopi, 1995), pp. 31–47. 21. Lopes, “The Myth of (Non‐Aesthetic) Artistic Value,” p. 535. 22. Lopes, “The Myth of (Non‐Aesthetic) Artistic Value,” p. 535. 23. Dominic McIver Lopes, Sight and Sensibility: Evaluating Pictures (Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 5. 24. For helpful comments, I thank Stephen Davies, Andrew Huddleston, Paisley Livingston, and Dom Lopes. © The American Society for Aesthetics This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model) © The American Society for Aesthetics http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism Oxford University Press

Artistic Value Defended

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Oxford University Press
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Abstract

In recent writing within the philosophy of art, it has become common to distinguish artistic and aesthetic value. There are multiple motivations for making this distinction, some of which are indicated below, but a common thread is a rejection of the aesthetic conception of art. That conception received its most refined expression in the writings of Monroe Beardsley.1 There, art is defined in terms of an intention to create an object that provides aesthetically valuable experience; understanding artworks consists in apprehending their aesthetic properties, and most important for the purpose of this article, the value of an artwork is identical to the value of the aesthetic experience it has the capacity to deliver. Each of these claims has been criticized by subsequent philosophers of art, but it is the criticism of the last claim that is pertinent here. There are two main thoughts behind this criticism: first, that there are valuable artworks that lack aesthetic value, and, second, that even among artworks that have aesthetic value, their value as art is not exhausted by their aesthetic value. Both thoughts suggest that we should distinguish between aesthetic and artistic value. However, the distinction has never received universal acceptance. There have been a number of recent attempts to reinvigorate an aesthetic conception of art and artistic value.2 In addition, Dominic McIver Lopes has recently argued that there is no coherent notion of nonaesthetic artistic value that is not trivial, that can distinguish between what makes works valuable as art and the adventitious values those works also possess.3 The main purpose of this article is to present arguments for the existence of artistic value and to provide a viable, nontrivial conception of such value. Since Lopes offers the most direct arguments against artistic value, I evaluate these and show that my proposals evade them. Finally, I challenge the one positive proposal Lopes makes in his article. For the sake of concision, henceforth, when I speak of artistic value, I mean a type of value not identical with, but that may include, aesthetic value. Artistic value, as I conceive it, derives from a set of values relevant to evaluating artworks as art. Aesthetic value no doubt is a member of this set, but not the only member. I take it that it is the existence of this type of value that is challenged by Lopes. i.some arguments for artistic value Why has it become widely held that there is such a thing as artistic value? As just noted, there are two main reasons. The first and simplest derives from the appearance of anti‐aesthetic art (originally simply called “anti‐art”), beginning with Dada, developing further in conceptual art, performance art, and other avant‐garde movements. These works were originally made to challenge a variety of assumptions about art, and were later made to redirect the focus of art from matters aesthetic to ideas of various kinds. It would be oversimplistic to claim that no works made within these movements have aesthetic value, but the thought is either that some of these works completely lack aesthetic interest yet are valuable as art or, more modestly, that some of these works have such modest aesthetic interest that their aesthetic value cannot account for their value as art. Something else must be involved. Consider, for example, Sherri Levine's photographs of Walker Evans's photographs. In a way, they do have aesthetic value since they inherit the aesthetic value of the object photographed. But that can hardly explain their value as art. I have argued elsewhere that the value of the photographs is primarily cognitive. They refocus our attention not only on properties, including aesthetic properties, but also on social and art‐historical ones that their subjects have as photographs.4 Levine's photographs also have art‐historical value in marking an important stage in the development of appropriated art, which also contributes to its value as art. From the premises that some artworks lack aesthetic value or lack sufficient aesthetic value to explain their value as art and that they have significant value as art, it follows that there is nonaesthetic artistic value. The second argument does not appeal to avant‐garde works specifically. It derives from a strong sense that many people—philosophers, artists, and critics—came to have that traditional aesthetic theory of the kind that was magisterially expressed in Beardsley's Aesthetics was inadequate to account for the value they found or intended to create in art. It does not do justice to the variety of ways in which we engage with artworks and with art's engagement with the world. Noël Carroll's “Art and Interaction” is an example of a fairly early article in this vein.5 In this piece, Carroll does not appeal to art's ability to teach us something about the actual world or the ethical properties of artworks that he wrote about in later essays. Rather, he focuses on other nonaesthetic properties of artworks that we value in interacting with them as artworks. Carroll points out that people enjoy the challenge of finding hidden meanings, latent structures, and important connections with other artworks. So art is valued as an object of interpretation; it has art‐historical value as well as cognitive value and ethical value. Further, that valuing artworks in these ways is an unremarkable way of responding to them as art is evident in the practice of critics and audiences. The aesthetic value of works does not wholly account for these responses. Artworks must have value as art that goes beyond their aesthetic value. Hence, there is nonaesthetic artistic value. The argument from indiscernibles is another argument for artistic value.6 It is the only one discussed by Lopes. It goes like this: 1 If the value of a work of art is wholly aesthetic, then its value supervenes on its perceptual features. 2 If the value supervenes on its perceptual features, then no work differs in value from an indiscernible twin. 3 Some works differ in value from perceptually indiscernible twins. 4 So the value of a work of art is not wholly aesthetic. 5 So works of art bear artistic value distinct from aesthetic value.7 So stated, it is a more problematic argument, I think, than the two mentioned above. As Lopes notes, 1 can be questioned. In fact, 1 is not plausible across the arts. Apart from any other problems it might have, it is false for literature and any other arts not accessed primarily through perception. Also, the expression ‘perceptual features’ is ambiguous, as has been pointed out by Peter Lamarque.8 It can mean a feature accessible to the senses with no background knowledge. Or it can mean any feature we can discern from perception no matter how much background information is required before we can do so. Two objects may be perceptually indiscernible in virtue of having the same perceptual features in the first sense, but may be perceptually discernible in virtue of their perceptual features in the second sense. Lamarque would argue that a restricted version of premise 1 (confined to perceptual artworks) might be true if ‘perceptual features’ is meant in the second sense, but a similarly restricted version of premise 3 would be true only if the first sense of ‘perceptual features’ is intended. Hence, the argument might commit the fallacy of equivocation. The bulk of Lopes's discussion focuses on the inference from 4 to 5. But I believe that misstates the real issue with which he is concerned, which is the reference of the expression ‘the value of a work of art.’ The expression occurs in 1 and 2 as well as 4. It is clearly meant to refer to the value of a work as art, or when evaluated as art. It is clearly not meant to refer to just any value an artwork might have for whatever reason. Lopes's discussion challenges whether there really is a referent to the expression meant as intended and whether we can specify what the referent is. The two earlier arguments are superior to the argument from indiscernibles. They are unquestionably valid and their premises are much harder to question than those of the argument from indiscernibles. One could try to argue that aesthetic value wholly accounts for the value of avant‐garde works mentioned in the first argument when evaluated as art, or alternatively, that they have little or no value when so evaluated. One could also try to argue that the types of value mentioned in the second argument really are not relevant to the evaluation of artworks as art, or that they can ultimately be understood as a species of aesthetic value. All of these positions have been argued, but, as I have argued elsewhere, with little success.9 The first two arguments also better capture the motivation for an appeal to artistic value. What they do not do is give us a general principle for distinguishing artistic value from just any value artworks happen to possess. But should we consider that a flaw in these arguments? Certainly not. The premises of these arguments do not purport to define artistic value. What they purport to do is to show that in evaluating works as art, we do not—in fact, cannot—confine ourselves to aesthetic value. That makes a strong prima facie case for the existence of nonaesthetic artistic value. We can say something stronger. They entail that if there is artistic value at all, there is nonaesthetic artistic value. Lopes, in arguing that we cannot specify the referent of the expression ‘(nonaesthetic) artistic value’ in a nontrivial way, is assuming that such a failure decisively undermines all three arguments. I would claim that is not so. If specifying requires defining artistic value (rather than, say, pointing to some examples of it), it might well be the case we cannot do that. The possibility of giving definitions of crucial philosophical concepts has often been questioned. Even without being able to give a precise way to distinguish nonaesthetic artistic value from nonartistic value of artworks, we may have sufficiently strong evidence of the existence of the former. An entailment is very strong evidence. Of course, if we can show that there is no such thing as artistic value at all, the entailment would be for naught. But, as we shall see, no participant in the debate believes that. However, I think there is a way to specify artistic value. So I now turn to how it can be done. ii.artistic value specified The immediate challenge is to find a way to distinguish nonaesthetic properties that contribute to artistic value from those that make works valuable in some way or other but without contributing to artistic value. Without such a distinction, it might be wondered if the above arguments confuse discovering nonaesthetic varieties of artistic value with simply finding ways we happen to value artworks. (It is worth remembering, though, that it was just argued at the end of the previous section that having a good reason to believe that there is nonaesthetic artistic value does not require a definition of such value.) Nevertheless, it would be good to have a deeper understanding of the nature of artistic value and the way that being artistically valuable is related to being valuable as a painting, and so on. How does one distinguish artistic value from nonartistic values that artworks happen to possess? As will be explained below, on my view, artistic value derives from what artists successfully intend to do in their works as mediated by functions of the art forms and genres to which the works belong. Here is a test I have proposed elsewhere that captures this: does one need to understand the work to appreciate its being valuable in that way? If so, it is an artistic value. If not, it is not.10 To make this test clearer, I need to say something about the sort of understanding I have in mind and how it is distinguished from other things that can be meant by understanding. Understanding derives primarily from interpreting artworks and, in particular, on my view, interpreting them for work meaning. This is a matter of discovering what an artist does in a work, usually, though not always, as result of intending to do just that.11 However, I do not want to confine the relevant sense of understanding to one view about interpretation. There are alternative views about work meaning as well as views about interpretation that eliminate reference to work meaning altogether. For example, there are views that make the central aim of interpretation appreciation of a work.12 Even after leaving open the exact nature of interpretation relevant to understanding a work, there are still many other things that could be meant by understanding that are excluded by this account. For example, for any property a work has, there is some explanation of why it has that property, and the explanation allows us to understand why it has the property. But to define ‘understanding an artwork’ in this way would not help us to distinguish a special class of properties responsible for artistic value since it covers all properties artworks possess, whereas the sense of understanding I have very briefly indicated is specifically related to the appreciation of artworks and, hence, a plausible route to discovering their value in art. Let us now see how applying the test works in practice. If an artwork has cognitive or ethical value that is part of its artistic value, one needs to understand the work to appreciate this value. That is, it is not enough to know that a work has an ethically controversial subject matter (say incest) to form a judgment about its artistic value. One has to learn what sort of exploration of its subject matter it provides, what attitudes toward this topic it manifests, what it requires its audience to imagine and to feel, before one can assess this value. That is what an appreciative understanding of a work allows. However, such understanding is not required to appreciate adventitious valuable properties of artworks. This is obvious for the ability of a painting to cover a hole in the wall. But it is also true of value derived from more complex social phenomena such as appreciating the financial value of a painting. To do this, one primarily needs to know the price similar paintings have garnered at auction or other sales. One can certainly go deeper by asking for an explanation of why some works are financially more valuable than others at a given time; this may require knowledge of some artistic qualities such as the style of the work or the artistic movement it is associated with, or even the quality critics consider it to have. But this nearly always falls well short of the understanding that full‐fledged interpretation provides, and, in any case, the connection between financial value and such qualities is always contingently based on the demand for works with such qualities and the available supply. Financial value varies while those qualities remain constant, which shows that no matter how well we understand a work that will never be sufficient to gauge financial value. There are some other cases that might be thought to challenge this criterion. I consider three here. First, one may wonder if one needs to understand works to appreciate their art‐historical significance, that is, features such as a work's originality, its being the culmination of a style, its being influential. Art‐historical value is often considered an artistic value, but if we want to say this is always so, it is necessary to distinguish ways a work can be influential that do not bestow art‐historical value. For example, a film might be the first to cause certain subliminal effects that enhance the value of product placement within it. The film then is valuable as advertising for the product, but is not artistically better. However, when we classify works as original, we usually do not merely mean that they have something new about them, but rather that they possess some valuable property intrinsic to (understanding) the work that was not found in earlier works, such as Vermeer's ability to depict the effects of light on objects, thereby creating new and very valuable experience, and also perhaps providing new knowledge of what we see. Second, consider naturalistic novels like The Jungle by Upton Sinclair and Germinal by Émile Zola. They were intended to vividly describe dangerous and unjust practices such as those institutionalized in the meat packing and coal mining industries, in part, in order to change those practices. Is success in changing them an artistic value? The mere fact that they are causally related to such changes is not an artistic value, any more than the fact that The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe caused a rash of suicides is a demerit in that work. But the fact that it is a defining feature of this type of literary artwork to be socially engaged in this way, when it succeeds in virtue of its literary properties such as vivid description, then this is an artistic virtue that requires an understanding of the work to appreciate. Finally, consider the sentimental value of a song for a certain couple. Part of the explanation of why the song has this value is simply that it was first heard on a significant occasion, and the significance has been transferred to the song. To appreciate this kind of significance requires no understanding of the song. However, it may be that this song, rather than others also heard on that special day, came to have sentimental value because it expressed a mood particularly fitting to the occasion. In that case, understanding the song is necessary for understanding why it has sentimental value for the couple. But sentimental value is usually regarded as nonartistic. However, it is not clear that this example constitutes a genuine counterexample to the proposal. One can say that the sentimental value that involves perceiving the song's expressive properties has two components. One is the value of the song as a vehicle for the expression of feeling. The second is the special significance of that expression of emotion for a particular couple that is based on the special occasion on which the song was heard. The first component involves an artistic value—a value the song would have even without its having sentimental value. The second component does not involve an artistic value. So we could say that sentimental value itself on occasion could involve a plurality of values, one artistic, one nonartistic. iii.arguments against artistic value: the trivializing strategy So much for the immediate challenge. Is discharging it sufficient to establish the existence of artistic value? Lopes might object that I have simply reproduced the notion of value in art, which he regards as a trivial conception of artistic value. I turn now to some of his arguments intended to back up such a claim. For his account of value in art, Lopes adopts a definition offered by Wolterstorff: V is a value in art = V is realized in a work to the extent that the work serves the purposes for which it was made or distributed.13 Call this VIN. VIN entails: V is a value in a work if and only if realizing V is a purpose for which the work was made or distributed. If this is right, then the proposal I have offered is not equivalent to value in art as so defined. Works are made for all kinds of purposes extraneous to what the artist does in the work, or to aims intrinsic to an art form or genre. For example, they might be made for the purpose of finding fame or fortune. This is equally, if not more, true for the purposes people have in distributing works. But appreciating the work's possession of such values does not require understanding the work. So my proposal rules them out as artistic values. However, Lopes indicates that he chose VIN somewhat arbitrarily. Other candidates could have been chosen. Since he refers to some of these, one can see that not all the candidates paint value in art with such a broad brush. In fact, some paint it with a finer brush than my own.14 Given that, I infer that there is a chance that Lopes might count my test for artistic value as simply indicating value in art. Concerning whether he actually would, I am not sure. But given the actual range of proposals that might count as indicating value in art, do all of these necessarily trivialize the notion of value as art? That is far from clear. What we have been after are values we find in art when we evaluate them as art. The two arguments endorsed above led us to think that when we evaluate works as art, we are not just evaluating them for aesthetic value because some works we value highly as art lack significant aesthetic value and many works that do have significant aesthetic value are valued as art for other properties they possess. So as long as we can carve off adventitious values, what is the problem? Why should the result trivialize value as art? Lopes thinks that it trivializes the notion of artistic value because it makes too many values artistic ones. “Examples of the artistic value recognized by the trivial theory include aesthetic value, propaganda value, theological value, moral value, therapeutic value, prurient value, and decorative value.”15 One can quibble about some of these items. The important thing to remember is that just because a work is, say, therapeutic does not mean that this is an artistic value. Therapeutic value could be an artistic value of some works, but merely being therapeutic is not sufficient to make it so. I have offered a test for when it is, but is there something more that can be said that underlies and justifies this test? Those who accept an aesthetic theory of art believe that artistic value derives from art's aesthetic nature. On one version of such a theory, artworks are objects intended for aesthetic regard and artistic value is the value we get from the work when properly understood and so regarded. This would obviously be aesthetic value. (I am not claiming that this is Lopes's route to an equivalent conclusion.) The aesthetic theory is the best known, and probably the most plausible instance of an essentialist conception of artistic value—a conception that purportedly derives from the nature of art. But the aesthetic theory of art has been under attack for some time, and despite some attempts, mentioned earlier, to revive it, it remains a minority view.16 The majority view is that knowing what art is will not provide knowledge of artistic value. This suggests that we need a nonessentialist account of artistic value.17 Artistic value derives from what artists intend to do in their works as mediated by functions of the art forms and genres to which the works belong. But even those functions change, and what changes them are artists' intentions (and perhaps we should add, changing cultural expectations). Given a nonessentialist conception of artistic value, it is not surprising that a large number of values are capable of being artistic values, and that what is an artistic value will not be uniform across all artworks. They remain artistic values because imbuing the work with such a value is part of the artist's project in making the work, and appreciating the value requires understanding the work. iv.arguments against artistic value: the art form strategy Lopes has two interesting argumentative strategies in advancing his critique of artistic value. The first is the trivializing strategy, which I have attempted to defuse in the previous section. The second is the art form strategy. This strategy argues that there are no artistic achievements, only pictorial, musical, or literary achievements. Hence, we cannot derive a notion of artistic value via a conception of artistic achievement. Also, artworks are never appreciated under the category “artwork,” but under more specific art form or art genre categories. Hence, we cannot derive a notion of artistic value via a notion of artwork as an appreciative category. This means that we do not appreciate objects as artworks and do not discover artistic achievements in understanding artists' projects. If this is so, it would undercut the arguments and the test for artistic value given above. However, as interesting and highly sophisticated as these arguments are, they are flawed for two separate reasons. First, sometimes a guiding category in appreciating an artwork is, in fact, the category of art. This is often true with avant‐garde works. When we first encounter items like readymades, we want to know not why they are readymades, or even what value they have as readymades, but why they are art and what value they have as art. This is understandable because when readymades first appeared, they were a novel art‐category and, in getting our bearings with regard to them, it is useful to wonder how they could be bearers of characteristically artistic value or how they could be related to other things we regard as art. Do they have aesthetic value despite claims to the contrary? Are they bearers of a kind of cognitive value that artworks of various kinds are good at delivering, such as making us feel the force of certain questions? However, an artwork need not belong to a novel form for it to directly raise questions about its artistic value. When we encounter photographs of photographs in an artworld context, we do not wonder why these are photographs, but we might wonder why they are art and what value they might have as art. This value might not be pictorial. It may or may not be peculiar to photographs, but it needs to be something we can recognize to be an artistic value. So we can appreciate objects as artworks per se and we can recognize characteristically artistic achievements. Second, the idea that we primarily value objects typed as painting or as music, not objects typed as art, is not quite right, or is at least misleading. This is because there are paintings typed as art and paintings not typed as art, and we value these in different, though overlapping, ways. There are products of commercial art, graphic design, illustration, and so on that are certainly paintings (and other graphic works), but are not members of the art form painting. This is not just true for paintings. Wherever there is an art form, there is a broader category, call it a medium. Members of the medium are valued in different ways depending on whether they also belong to the relevant art form or not. However, all members of a medium can be evaluated aesthetically. So there must be other artistic values that explain the different ways we value different members of a medium. I believe art‐historical values, which are not peculiar to any one art form, are particularly significant here. The important point, though, is that in valuing something as a member of an art form, typing it as art is just as important as typing it as a painting. It is the joint typing that allows us to value it appropriately. In addition, if we make cross‐categorial comparative evaluations of artworks, we are not evaluating them solely as belonging in a category. We do not just lump together the great art from diverse categories; we rank them, or we argue, for instance, that the best folk tune cannot be as good as the best symphony.18 Finally, although Lopes questions whether we value items as art as opposed to valuing them as paintings, poems, photos, and so on, his final verdict is ambivalent: (1) nothing has value typed as art and yet (2) there is such a thing as artistic value (understood as aesthetic value). One can render (1) and (2) consistent only by qualifying at least one of these. By (1), Lopes might mean: nothing has value simply typed as art. If this is what he does mean, that would do the trick, without denying there is artistic value. We could agree with this view without undercutting the arguments and the test for artistic value. In the end, all agree that there is artistic value, even if being valuable as art derives from being valuable as something else, such as a painting, or a poem, and so on. This conclusion is further supported by Lopes's one positive proposal, to which I now turn. v.artistic value as aesthetic value Lopes's positive proposal is: V is an artistic value = V is an aesthetic value of an artwork as a K, where K is art form, genre, or other art kind.19 A possible problem for this view arises if there are artworks that do not belong to an art kind but possess artistic value. Consider items like carpets, quilts, or furniture. Some of these items can be so beautiful, expressive, or meaningful that we literally (not merely honorifically) count them as artworks. But are these, like painting, media within which there is an art form? I doubt this is so in some cases such as furniture.20 An item of furniture is an artwork because of its great aesthetic value, yet it lacks aesthetic value of an artwork as a K because there is no art kind K to which it belongs. So it is an artwork because of its aesthetic value, but, according to Lopes's positive proposal, it does not have artistic value because it lacks aesthetic value as a K. That is implausible. This point might seem a quibble. Could we not cook up a category of furniture art, that is, the category composed of all pieces of furniture that are artworks? But that begs the question whether the pieces of furniture simply have aesthetic value or whether they have something distinctively different: not just aesthetic value or even aesthetic value as furniture, but aesthetic value as furniture art. That they have the last kind of value is highly implausible. I believe the concept of aesthetic value as an art kind K betrays a more basic misunderstanding of aesthetic value as compared with artistic value. Artistic value comprises a diverse set of values because it is any value relevant to the evaluation of artworks as art, or, in other words, it is any value that we derive from works existing within art institutions or practices when appreciated as members of those institutions or practices. (So if we are appreciating something as belonging to the art form painting, we are ipso facto appreciating it as art.) An analogy would be religious value or political value. But aesthetic value is quite different because it is not derived from any particular institution or practice. It is everywhere. It has to be defined in its own right, like hedonic value or cognitive value. Aesthetic value can be realized in different ways in different media, but it cannot be a different value in different media. So the real problem with the above proposal is that there is no such thing as aesthetic value as a K. ‘Aesthetic value as a K’ lacks a referent, even if there are plenty of Ks that have aesthetic value. vi.conciliatory gestures Toward the end of his article, Lopes makes a couple of remarks that seem conciliatory toward advocates of artistic value. First, “aesthetic value need not go it alone. There are many values in art, which can and do contribute to the summative understanding of the value of art.”21 One would like to hear more about: aesthetic value not going it alone in … doing what? Evaluating artworks as art? Is a summative understanding of the value of art what we need to evaluate artworks as art? If the answer to these questions is affirmative, then I wonder why Lopes denies the existence of (nonaesthetic) artistic value, for these remarks would affirm its existence. But if the answers are negative, then the point of this remark is unclear to me. Second, “the point is not whether cognitive and moral value in artworks are artistic values but whether they interact in significant ways with aesthetic value.”22 Whether interaction occurs is an important question. Interaction, as Lopes understands it, involves one kind of value implying or entailing another.23 When both values are present in an artwork, it is conceivable that one is still irrelevant to the artistic value of the work. Yes, it might be said, the work has moral value, and this implies that it has an aesthetic value that makes it a better artwork, but the moral value itself is irrelevant to its being a better artwork. This is logically possible. It is just very implausible. When two values are so related in an artwork, it is usually relevant to the artist's projects in making the work and, if the project is successful and worthy, both values would be relevant to the work's value as art. Let me make some conciliatory gestures too. I think Lopes sees that the only viable conception of nonaesthetic artistic value would be a nonessentialist one. We agree about this. We also agree that some of these nonaesthetic values interact in significant ways with aesthetic value in some artworks. When this happens, those works cannot be properly understood or evaluated without taking this interaction into account. We agree on this too. We disagree about whether some notion of aesthetic value can be deployed in providing a free‐standing conception of artistic value. I have argued that it cannot; Lopes thinks that it can. We also disagree on whether there is a satisfactory account of nonaesthetic artistic value that distinguishes it from value in art. I have argued that there is; Lopes thinks there is not. If I have been successful, two things have been established. First, there are good arguments that show that there is artistic value distinct from aesthetic value, and, second, we have a way of identifying the former. Artistic value is value that can only be appreciated by understanding the works that possess it.24 Footnotes 1. Monroe C. Beardsley, Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1958) and the essays contained in The Aesthetic Point of View (Cornell University Press, 1982) are together the best source for Beardsley's evolved aesthetic theory of art. 2. Such attempts include Gary Iseminger, The Aesthetic Function of Art (Cornell University Press, 2004) and Nick Zangwill, Aesthetic Creation (Oxford University Press, 2007). I have critiqued these proposals in “Aesthetic Creation and Artistic Value,”Art and Philosophy (Poland) 35 (2009): 68–82; “Review of ‘The Aesthetic Function of Art,’”Philosophical Review 116 (2007): 115–18; and Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art, 2nd edition (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2010), pp. 233–236. 3. Dominic McIver Lopes, “The Myth of (Non‐Aesthetic) Artistic Value,”Philosophical Quarterly 61 (2011): 518–536. 4. Stecker, Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art, pp. 233–234. 5. Noël Carroll, “Art and Interaction,”The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 45 (1986): 57–68. 6. This is adapted from an argument given by Danto on a different topic: the nature of art. See Arthur C. Danto, “The Artworld,”Journal of Philosophy 61 (1964): 571–584. Danto greatly elaborates on the relevance of indiscernibles to the philosophy of art, including its relevance to aesthetic appreciation, in The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (Harvard University Press, 1981). 7. Lopes, “The Myth of (Non‐Aesthetic) Artistic Value,” p. 519. 8. Peter Lamarque, Work and Object: Explorations in the Metaphysics of Art (Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 61–66. 9. Beardsley was skeptical that some avant‐garde works were art, which would deprive them of the chance to possess artistic value. Richard Lind, “The Aesthetic Essence of Art,”The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 50 (1992): 117–129, and James Shelley, “The Problem of Non‐perceptual Art,”The British Journal of Aesthetics 43 (2002): 363–378, argue that the value of avant‐garde works can be understood in aesthetic terms. Malcom Budd's Values of Art: Pictures, Poetry and Music (London: Penguin, 1995) is the most impressive effort to incorporate all artistic value within the valuable experience of the work, which could be regarded as incorporating it into aesthetic value. See Stecker, Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art, pp. 221–246, for rebuttals of all these attempts. 10. Stecker, Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art, p. 240. 11. In Robert Stecker, Interpretation and Construction: Art, Speech and the Law (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003). 12. See Peter Lamarque, “Appreciation and Literary Interpretation,” in Is There a Single Right Interpretation? ed. Michael Krausz (Penn State University Press, 2002), pp. 285–306. 13. Lopes, “The Myth of (Non‐Aesthetic) Artistic Value,” p. 520. Adopted from Nicholas Wolterstorff, Art in Action (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdman, 1980), p. 157. 14. Lopes, “The Myth of (Non‐Aesthetic) Artistic Value,” p. 520, n.4. Lopes refers to Iseminger's attempt to specify artistic value in The Aesthetic Function of Art. Iseminger identifies artistic value with the fulfilling of art's aesthetic function, thereby proposing a view close to Lopes’s. If this is an instance of merely specifying value in art, there is nothing trivial about it. It is highly controversial. 15. Lopes, “The Myth of (Non‐Aesthetic) Artistic Value,” p. 521. 16. Beginning especially with the work of Arthur Danto and George Dickie. See Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace and Dickie, Art and the Aesthetic (Cornell University Press, 1974). 17. I have argued for a nonessentialist conception of artistic value in “Two Conceptions of Aesthetic Value,”Iyyun: The Jerusalem Philosophical Quarterly 46 (1997): 51–62, and Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art, pp. 221–246. 18. Alan H. Goldman argues that we make such comparisons in Aesthetic Value (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1995). 19. Lopes, “The Myth of (Non‐Aesthetic) Artistic Value,” p. 535. 20. Stephen Davies asserts precisely this with regard to architectural artworks. He argues that some buildings are artworks, but architecture is not an art form. See Stephen Davies, “Is Architecture an Art?” in Philosophy and Architecture, ed. Michael Mitias (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Editions Rodopi, 1995), pp. 31–47. 21. Lopes, “The Myth of (Non‐Aesthetic) Artistic Value,” p. 535. 22. Lopes, “The Myth of (Non‐Aesthetic) Artistic Value,” p. 535. 23. Dominic McIver Lopes, Sight and Sensibility: Evaluating Pictures (Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 5. 24. For helpful comments, I thank Stephen Davies, Andrew Huddleston, Paisley Livingston, and Dom Lopes. © The American Society for Aesthetics This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model) © The American Society for Aesthetics

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Published: Nov 1, 2012

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