Value in Art

In philosophy, the question of the nature of art—what art is—has been discussed far more than the question of the value of art—why art matters. Of course, these two questions cannot be completely separated, because in any account of what constitutes art, one inevitably singles out properties that are of special importance. In fact, in all major theories of the nature of art, there is an implicit account of its value, but since the question of the value of art has not only philosophical importance but also social importance, it is well worth making these implicit accounts explicit [in other words, stating these implicit accounts clearly], and thus subjecting them to critical examination.

Four ways of thinking have been proposed as the four main approaches that philosophers and artists have adopted in accounting for the importance of art. They can be given straightforward labels: hedonism¹, aestheticism², expressivism³, and cognitivism⁴. Briefly, the first theory holds that art is valuable because of the pleasure derived from it. The second theory says that art is valuable as a source of beauty. The third theory considers art valuable as a means of expressing feeling/emotion. And according to the fourth theory, art, as [a discipline] equivalent to science and philosophy, yet distinct from them, is a source of knowledge and understanding.

In the compressed statement given above, it is not clear whether each of these theories interprets the relationship between art and its value as intrinsic or instrumental—that is, whether the value in question is to be found in art itself, or whether art is merely a means to it. It is also unclear whether that value resides in the properties of art objects—books, sculptures, paintings, musical compositions, and the like—or in the experiences these objects create in their viewers or listeners. These are issues that can be examined at a general level, but in fact the distinctions they raise—intrinsic/instrumental, and object/experience—are more important in some accounts of the value of art than in others.

Hedonism

The belief that the value of art lies in the pleasure we derive from it is both a long-standing/ancient belief and a common one. In fact, most people, including those involved in various arts, probably assume its validity without any question. At the same time, this theory, as an account of the value and importance of art, faces several problems. Before these problems can be examined directly, I must offer an explanation.

Naturally, people describe their engagement with art in terms of [or in the language of] pleasure and express their artistic judgments in the form of liking and disliking. One consequence of this is that positive reactions to art are usually interpreted as expressions of the enjoyment [or delight] derived from encountering things we like; this then leads to the assumption that a favorable view of an artwork is a kind of expression of pleasure. But in fact, equating pleasure⁵ and enjoyment⁶ is a mistake. Enjoyment may result from things other than pleasure. While enjoying a good drink or a good meal is largely, and sometimes exclusively, the result of gustatory pleasure, a scientific lecture or a television documentary can be agreeable because of its intellectual content. They may provide interesting material and subjects to think about, and not a pleasant experience to be enjoyed.

One might answer that intellectual stimulation is a particular kind of pleasure. The danger of this type of answer is that it reduces the valuable⁷ merely to the pleasurable⁸ and thus turns a substantive claim⁹—that art is valuable because it is pleasurable—into an empty analytic claim¹—that is, in that case, saying that art is valuable is exactly the same as saying that art is pleasurable. In this way, the claim about value and pleasure becomes a claim that is true by definition². Consequently, if hedonism about art is to be a substantive theory, a distinction must be drawn between enjoying something and taking pleasure in it. The fact that we take pleasure in something is one reason for enjoying it and finding it valuable. But it is not the only possible reason for it.

In light of this clarification, the three main questions facing hedonism about art can now be articulated. First, is it generally true, as an empirical fact, that the arts produce pleasurable experiences? Second, can a distinction be made between major and minor works of art on the basis of pleasure? Third, if art is valuable because of the pleasure it gives [us], will art not be a useless thing in view of other, superior sources of pleasure?

The first of these questions is a factual one, regarding which one must be open-minded. Since most theorists of the value and importance of art are probably themselves lovers [and devotees] of art, they naturally tend to assume that art generally yields pleasure. But the statistics of people who attend classical concerts, read serious literary books, and visit art exhibitions do not support this. If the arts are examined solely on the basis of the pleasure derived from them, then certainly, in most cases, soap operas, pop music, violent computer games, and popular romantic science fiction rank far higher than opera, classical music, [the works of] Shakespeare, and the Russian novels of the nineteenth century. In fact, the situation of the arts is worse than this. Many people, instead of being entertained by Shakespeare's works, are bored by them, and for these same people, two hours of listening to the music of Bach or Beethoven is probably a dreadful prospect. Even in the case of those works of art that were explicitly created for entertainment, it may be that, over time, little pleasure is derived from them. For example, Restoration comedy³, compared to modern television comedies like Friends⁴ or Blackadder⁵, is a much weaker source of entertainment.

These examples, chosen to illustrate the points above, can also be used to elucidate the second of the three aforementioned problems. The classical music enthusiast might insist that the primary value of attending a concert is, in fact, the pleasure we derive from it. Although it is true that tastes [and preferences] differ, this pleasure, for those who find concert-going pleasurable, is as great as, and even greater than, the pleasure of pop music, primarily because very high-quality music is repeatedly pleasurable. A similar claim could be made on behalf of all the arts, but even if we accept that the arts give great pleasure to their devotees, this is by no means a reason to rank them higher than more ordinary sources of pleasure, such as crossword puzzles, jigsaw puzzles, and board games.

Jeremy Bentham⁶ (1748–1832), the utilitarian philosopher, explicitly addressed this issue; he was inclined to argue that since pleasure is the ultimate source of all value, push-pin⁷ (a type of board game) is as good as poetry. However, what escaped Bentham's notice was that if hedonism is accepted, not only does a question arise about the comparative value of the aesthetic and the non-aesthetic, but furthermore, a problem also arises within the realm of the aesthetic itself. If the value of a work of art derives from the pleasure obtained from it, then more pleasure must be obtained from major works of art compared to minor works of art. But is there any reason to believe this?

Is it possible that the pleasure associated with a person’s estimation of an artwork’s aesthetic merit is the determining factor? Is there any guarantee that, for example, a piece of music by a great composer like Beethoven¹ will yield more pleasure than a piece by a less significant composer like Luigi Boccherini²?

This question raises a contentious philosophical issue: whether or not pleasure can be measured. But even if pleasure could be measured, it is difficult to show that the relative amount of pleasure derived from various works of art is proportionate to the relative artistic value typically attributed to them. A proposed solution to this second problem can be found in Bentham’s utilitarian successor, John Stuart Mill³ (1806–1873); Mill sought to distinguish between higher and lower pleasures, and this distinction can be used to privilege the relative merits of poetry over those of pushpin, and the merits of Beethoven over those of Boccherini. But how should one differentiate between higher and lower pleasures? According to Mill, this can only be done on the basis of quantity or quality. He believed that quantity does not serve this purpose, because if the only difference between higher and lower pleasures were quantity, then any lower pleasure, provided there was a greater amount of it, could equal the value of a higher pleasure. Therefore, the difference between the two must be a qualitative one. But how is this difference in quality to be gauged? Mill’s answer is that the assessment must be entrusted to a competent judge⁴, and he defines a competent judge as someone who has experienced both pleasures in question. The problem with this proposal is that the judgments⁵ of such a judge cannot, in principle, be distinguished from their mere preferences⁶. Someone who says that opera yields a higher pleasure than a soap opera might indeed have noticed a different quality in the pleasures derived from each. Yet there may be nothing more to this “judgment” than their personal preference in favor of opera. And we have no way of determining what the case truly is.

In any event, there is another problem. If the value of art lies in the pleasure derived from it, and if, as is obvious, other sources of pleasure, such as sports, are also available, it follows that a world devoid of art would be no worse than a world with art, provided that in that world other sources from which equally pleasurable experiences could be derived existed. This objection relates to an important distinction raised at the beginning of the discussion, namely the distinction between instrumental and intrinsic value. Hedonism ascribes instrumental value⁷, not intrinsic value⁸, to art, thereby implying that art, in and of itself, has no value. It is largely on this basis that an alternative theory of art’s value, aestheticism, is founded.

Aestheticism

The slogan “art for art’s sake” is a familiar one, intended to express the idea that art possesses a value that cannot be acquired or realized in any other way. What could this intrinsic value be? An obvious candidate is beauty. Since antiquity, it has been held that an important function of the arts is to create beautiful things—paintings, poems, music, buildings, and the like—and that these things should be enjoyed solely for their beauty. Aestheticism holds that, although beautiful things are indeed pleasing, their value lies in their beauty, not in the pleasure derived from them. This beauty is an intrinsic property of the object; therefore, unlike the accidental effect of the object giving us pleasure, which is changeable and replaceable, beauty cannot be altered or substituted without being lost.

However, while it is undoubtedly the case that a great many works of art are very beautiful and are valuable largely for this reason, it seems to me that beauty cannot be considered the ultimate explanation for their value, for two reasons. First, beauty can be found in places other than art. Second, not all art is beautiful, nor is it always intended to be.

The existence of natural beauty is proof of the first point. Since ancient Greece, the human body and face have not only been praised for their beauty, but have also been regarded as models and standards against which the beauty of pictures and statues should be measured. Since the eighteenth century, landscapes, skies, and seascapes have also been considered outstanding examples of beautiful things. All of these are natural, not manufactured, things, and therefore (regardless of the subject of divine creation) are not works of art. But if beauty is everywhere in the form of natural forms, a world devoid of art would not be a world devoid of beauty, and while this fact does not diminish the value of artistic beauty, it does mean that beauty cannot be considered a value exclusive to art.

In any case, although some works of art are truly beautiful, this is not true of all of them. Indeed, the concept of beauty cannot easily be applied to certain works of art. There are beautiful dialogues in Shakespeare's tragedies, but can King Lear or Othello2, in their entirety, be called beautiful? In Picasso's famous painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon3, the figures and faces are ugly—apparently deliberately so. Many modern composers have written music that is harsh and disjointed rather than harmonious and melodic. The Pre-Raphaelite4 painters and the Romantic composers of the nineteenth century strove for visual and auditory beauty, but the movements that emerged after them in the twentieth century strove with equal vigor to avoid this beauty. In short, an exclusive focus on beauty can, at best, only explain the value of a portion of art, and even then, that value will not be exclusive to art.

Expressivism / Expressionism

The two objections raised against aestheticism are resolved in a third theory: the value of art lies in its being an expression of emotion1. The difference between natural beauty and beauty in art is that natural beauty expresses nothing, whereas beauty in art possesses this characteristic. Art is the expression of the artist's emotion or feeling2. In contrast, emotion, although it can be expressed through beauty, can also be expressed through other means. What allows us to place Titian3, Picasso, Schubert, and Schoenberg together under the heading of "art" is that these fundamentally different styles are all equally modes of expression.

Expressivism, as an explanation of the value of art, is often widely held, with the same breadth seen in the case of hedonism.

Benedetto Croce1 (1866–1952), the Italian philosopher, and Leo Tolstoy2 (1828–1910), the great Russian novelist, were among its most famous proponents. But upon closer examination, we will see that this theory also faces fundamental problems. Three of them are particularly significant: Whose feeling does the work of art express? Why is expressing feeling a good thing? What place does expressivism leave for imagination?

It might seem obvious that in answer to the first question, one should say that the feeling expressed is the feeling of the creator of the art (the writer, painter, composer, etc.). But suppose, for example, we say of Othello that this work is an expression of jealousy/envy in the form of a play [is a dramatic expression of jealousy]. Why should we say that this is Shakespeare's jealousy that is expressed [here]? Since we know almost nothing about Shakespeare, and a fortiori about his circumstances while writing this play, we have no reason for this claim. A similar point can be made about many works of art. We know little, if anything, about the psychological or emotional history of the creators of those works, and therefore we cannot say whether they themselves even had the feelings expressed in their works.

An alternative is to locate the emotion in the audience [meaning that the work of art expresses the audience's emotion]. Aristotle believed that dramatic works are "cathartic"¹.

These works become tools in the hands of the audience, and with the help of those tools they can purge their emotions; emotions which, when spilled into the space of everyday life, are often corrosive—his famous examples are fear and pity. By discharging these feelings onto imaginary subjects, we lighten their burden on the shoulders of our daily occupations. Aristotle applied the theory of catharsis² only to drama, and it is unclear whether this theory is applicable to all the arts or not. But even if it is applicable to all of them, a second question arises: what is it about the expression of emotion, in and of itself, that is so good?

Suppose a work of art allows its viewers or listeners, or those who otherwise contemplate it, to purge their tribal/ethnic feeling. Without this work, their racist sentiments would never have found such clear definition or powerful expression. Yet why should the work be acceptable to us on account of this feature? It seems to me most reasonable to say that it is the powerful expression of good emotions that should be valuable, not the expression of emotion in and of itself. Conversely, harmful or destructive emotions ought not to be given powerful expression.

Therefore, defining the emotion expressed in a work of art as the emotion of the audience has no positive value. It could just as easily be negative. Attributing it to the creator of the work, in many cases, means making unwarranted assumptions about the artist's biography. Yet another problem is that, apparently, by insisting on the condition³ that the origins of the work of art must lie in the personal history of its maker, we thereby negate any influence on that very faculty so crucial to artistic creativity, namely the imagination. The great genius of a major work of art like the novel Middlemarch,⁴ lies in George Eliot's ability to transcend the limitations of personal experience and imagine a world composed of people and events the author never witnessed. The most fundamental objection to expressivism is that it reduces the operations of the imagination to the acts of narrating and reporting.

Cognitivism

Some proponents of the expressivist account of art, notably R. G. Collingwood⁵ (1889–1943), have noticed this problem, and in their attempts to deflect it, they have effectively shifted their focus from emotion and expression to imagination and understanding. If there is value in works that express or describe racist sentiments or other negative feelings, that value lies not in the expression itself, but in the understanding those works give us of the minds of people who harbor such feelings.

This notion provided the impetus/motivation for the shift from expressivism to cognitivism; according to cognitivism, art should be valued as a form of understanding. On this view, the powerful expression of emotion we find, for example, in Othello, should be valued because it helps us to understand the mind and inner world of intensely jealous individuals.

From this perspective, the play provides its audience with material for thought, not for feeling, and it is of no importance whatsoever whether Shakespeare himself actually possessed the anger evident in the character he created. In fact, if he did not himself feel such an emotion, [the importance of] the critical evaluation of his play is doubled, for in that case the play presents itself as an even more astonishing act of imagination. Thus, aesthetic cognitivism overcomes the most significant objections leveled against expressivism by regarding works of art as acts of imagination rather than autobiography, and by locating their value precisely in this. By directing its attention to the imagination, this theory, moreover, dispels some of the objections raised against aestheticism and hedonism as well. The products of imagination / the achievements of imagination can be beautiful, but being beautiful is not the criterion for their being works of art. Works of art are entirely different from natural beauty, because natural beauty is not an achievement of the imagination. The relative merits of major and minor works are due to the intensity and depth of the understanding they create for us, and this judgment is independent of the pleasure we do or do not derive from them. Relatively superficial works may be charming and pleasing. Far more profound works are, of course, tedious. Yet at the same time, aesthetic cognitivism faces its own specific difficulties. The first problem among them is the relationship between imagination and reality. If it must be said that works of art enhance understanding, it follows that these works provide insight into the realities of human experience. But if the people, places, and events depicted in these works are all products of the imagination, how can they accomplish this? Should not understanding be directed at how things are in reality, rather than how they have been constructed in someone's imagination?

Secondly, although cognitivism may have some plausibility with regard to representational art, it seems more implausible when applied to abstract art. It is easy to imagine that great novels, films, and pictorial paintings provide insight into life, but how can this be claimed in the same sense for abstract paintings, instrumental music, or architecture?

These are important questions, and it is by no means clear that they can be answered. But even if they can be answered, another problem remains. Does not cognitivism about the arts, as was seen with hedonism, lead to their being somehow useless? G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831) was perhaps the first of the great philosophers whose account of art can be described as predominantly cognitivist, and he explicitly believed that since the value of art lies in its contribution to the expansion/development of human understanding, it must therefore ultimately cede its place to philosophy. It can be said that art, even at its best, can only be an intimation of the kind of understanding that attains clarity (and explicitness) through philosophy.

The most promising response to this concern lies in emphasizing the sensuous¹ nature of art, by virtue of which it can enhance our felt experience. It is not that a work of art tells us something about things, events, or people by stating general propositions about them. Rather, the work of art describes what has been called a "concrete universal," which are products of the imagination through which we arrive at an understanding of what it is like to be present to and to experience things, people, and events from a particular perspective. In other words, art illuminates the things around us rather than furnishing us with information about them in the manner customary in science, history, and philosophy.

Whether this response is ultimately convincing is itself an important subject, but cognitivism's emphasis on the sensuous and the imaginative can hold true for two essential aspects of the arts. Another implication of cognitivism is that if sensuousness is intrinsic to art, the late twentieth-century movement known as conceptual art can be seen as a sign of the acknowledgment of the end of art. This is an implication that some philosophers, notably Arthur C. Danto, have affirmed and even welcomed.

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Source:

Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 1 (Abbagnano - Byzantine Phil.), 2006, Thomson and Gale ,pp 337- 342.

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Notes:

1_ hedonism

2_ aestheticism

3_ experssionism

4_ cognitivism

5_ pleasure

6_ enjoy ment

7_ valuable the

8_ pleasurable,the

9_ مفیدِ معنا Substantial

10_ uninformative

11_ true by definition

12_ Restoration comedy. The Restoration period refers to the era following the return of Charles II to the throne (of Britain) in 1660.

13_ Friends

14_ Blackadder

15_ Jermy Bentham

16_ Pushpin. A type of children's game that was common in England from the 16th to the 19th centuries.

17_ Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827), eminent German musician.

18_ Luigi Boccherini (1743–1805), Italian composer.

19_ John Stuart mill

20_ Competent

21_ deliverances

22_ preferances

23_ instrumental value

24_ intrinsic value

25_ ultimate explanation

26_ lear

27_ Othellp

28_ Les demoiselles

29_ Pre- Raphaelite Painters d’Avignon

A work by the contemporary Spanish painter Pablo Picasso (1881–1973). This work depicts five women in a brothel on Avignon Street in the city of Barcelona, Spain. In this work, Picasso portrays an ugly image of those women. This work is considered one of the important pieces in the formation of Cubism and a turning point in modern art. The work is currently held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

30_ emotion

31_ feeling

32_ Titian

(1488/1490–1576), Italian painter.

33_ Benedetto Croce

34_ Leo Tolstoy

35_ cathartic

36_ theory of catharsis

37_ psychological biography

38_ middle march

39_ R.G.Collingwood

40_ sensuous

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References

Aristotle. Poetics. Translated by Malcolm Heath. London:Penguin, 1997.

Bell, Clive. Art. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 1987.

Budd,Malcolm. Values of Art. London: Penguin, 1995.

Collingwood, R. G. The Principles of Art. Oxford, U.K.:Clarendon Press, 1938.

Croce, Benedetto. Æsthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic. Translated by Douglas Ainslie. London: Peter Owen, 1953.

Danto, Arthur C. After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997.

Gadamer, Hans-Georg. “The Relevance of the Beautiful” and Other Essays. Translated by Nicholas Walker. Cambridge,

U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

Goodman, Nelson.Ways of Worldmaking. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. 1978.

Hegel, G.W. F. Aesthetics. Translated by T. M. Knox. Oxford, U.K.: Clarendon Press, 1975.

ART, VALUE IN ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY

2 n d e d i t i o n • 341

Hume, David. Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 1963.

Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgment. Translated by Werner S. Pluhar. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1987.

Langer, Susanne K. Feeling and Form. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1953.

Levinson, Jerrold. The Pleasures of Aesthetics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996.

Mill, John Stuart. Utilitarianism. London: Fontana, 1985.

Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. The Birth of Tragedy. Translated by Shaun Whiteside. London: Penguin, 1993.

Schaper, Eva, ed. Pleasure, Preference, and Value: Studies in Philosophical Aesthetics. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

Scruton, Roger. Art and Imagination. London: Methuen, 1974.

Tolstoy, Leo. What Is Art? Translated by Aylmer Maude. Oxford, U.K.:World Classics, 1955.

Walton, Kendall L. Mimesis as Make-Believe. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990.

Gordon Graham (2005)

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Value in Art

Gordon Graham

Translated by Insha'allah Rahmati

Published in Issue 144 of Ettela'at Hekmat va Ma'refat Journal

This article is part of the Encyclopedia of Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art and includes articles from the Encyclopedia of Philosophy edited by Paul Edwards and Donald Borchert. The translator, continuing the work done on Paul Edwards' Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which has so far reached its second edition, is preparing the second part of this encyclopedia.

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