What Makes One Work of Art Better Than Another - From Aesthetic Judgment to Canonicity (original) (raw)

Aesthetic and Artistic Verdicts

Croatian Journal of Philosophy, 2019

In this article I propose a way of thinking about aesthetic and artistic verdicts that would keep them distinct from one another. The former are refl ections of the kinds of things we prefer and take pleasure in; the latter are refl ections of other judgments we make about the kinds of achievements that are made in works of art. In part to support this view of verdicts, I also propose a way of keeping distinct the description, the interpretation, and the evaluation of works of art. (And along the way, I worry about whether we offer the same kinds of interpretations of the objects of our aesthetic pleasures, properly considered, that we clearly do offer with respect to works of art.) The thesis I propose-the achievement model-is not original with me. What is original, perhaps, is that it is posed as an alternative to two other views of artistic evaluation, namely the appeal to "ideal critics" and the appeal to one way of understanding our preferences with regard to works of art. I do not attempt to show that each of these alternatives meets with insuperable problems; but I do indicate what I take to be the substantive content of those problems. In the end, in order to fl esh out the thesis I propose, I borrow some material from the literature on human well-being concerning how we determine what an achievement is.

How to judge a work of art today

Artefilosofia, 2017

How to judge a work of art? This question, already present in the Critique of the Power of Judgment by Immanuel Kant, was updated in France in the early 1990s (thus more or less two centuries later), when the Esprit and Télérama journals dedicated some issues to what was called a "crisis" in contemporary art, namely the supposed loss of normative criteria allowing one to evaluate artworks. Following their publication, several French philosophers-among which Marc Jimenez, Yves Michaud, Gérard Genette, Jean-Marie Schaeffer, and Rainer Rochlitztook part in a public debate on judgment, which more or less explicitly centered on the third Critique, in terms similar to those employed by Kant himself in 1790. Underlining the specificity of this debate, the present paper intends to (re)examine the issue of the judgment on works of art, by presenting and responding to two types of relativism and establishing a dialogue between Kantian aesthetics and contemporary philosophical discourses.

How we judge art

Irish Marxist Review, 2020

This article is an extract from Chapter 2 of John's forthcoming book "The Dialectics of Art", due to be published by Haymarket in December 2020.

Aesthetic Values Before and Beyond the Evaluation of Artworks

Essays on Values and Practical Rationality - Ethical and Aesthetical Dimensions (Ed. by A. Marques & J. Sáàgua), (Bern: Peter Lang AG), 2018

One of the main purposes of this chapter is to determine the meaning and scope of the expression ‘aesthetic value’, to argue that aesthetic and artistic values are not exactly the same even though the artistic value of an artwork may result in part from its aesthetic value. Moreover, other types of values such as cognitive, ethical, political and social shall every so often be taken into account in the evaluation of artworks. And one of the consequences of that distinction – between the aesthetic and the artistic3 – is the fact that the range of consideration of aesthetic values goes way beyond the evaluation of artworks insofar as aesthetic experience is not an exclusive business4 of the artistic domain. Thinking about aesthetic values, as often happens when we think about aesthetic concepts, properties or experiences, will give us the opportunity to question the term 'aesthetic', which progressively entered philosophical discourse during the eighteenth century but whose meaning has oscillated over time and generated various misconceptions and ambiguities. Finally, another important aspect that this chapter takes in consideration for the clarification of the notion of ‘aesthetic value’ is obviously the concept of 'value' per se and the close affinities between aesthetic values, on one hand, and ethical and cognitive ones on the other.

Making and matching: aesthetic judgement and art historical knowledge

I argue that aesthetic judgement plays a key role in the production of art historical knowledge and that judgements of taste lie at the very heart of art historical practice. My key claim is that in their encounters with art the art historian makes parallel judgements. First, they make critical and connoisseurial judgments, which they may or may not choose to acknowledge. Second, further judgements are made on the particular discursive and historical models that they have chosen to use. My argument is that, even though they might not like to admit it, such discursive judgements are, also, aesthetic ones. In short, art historians are involved in a process that attempts to reconcile two things: on the one hand a mode of writing and on the other the art which that writing negotiates. My conclusion is that aesthetic judgements play a key role in this negotiation and hence in the genesis and structure of art historical discourse. Key words: Kunstwissenschaft; aesthetics; judgment; writing; art history

Legitimate judgment in art, the scientific world reversed?: Critical distance in evaluation

Social Studies of Science, 2013

This article considers affinities between artistic and scientific evaluations. Objectivity has been widely studied, as it is thought the foundation for legitimate judgments of truth. Yet we know comparatively little about subjectivity apart from its characterization as the obstacle to objective knowledge. In this article, I examine how subjectivity operates as an epistemic virtue in artistic evaluation, which is an especially interesting field for study given the accepted relativism of taste. Data are taken from interviews with 30 book reviewers drawn from major American newspapers including The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, and others. The data reveal that critics invest in a set of strategies to effectively ‘objectivize’ the subjectivity intrinsic to artistic evaluation, which I refer to collectively as strategies for maintaining critical distance. I argue that the concrete procedures for producing legitimate judgment in the world of art can be usefully compared to the norms for legitimate judgment in science.

What Matters in Contemporary Art? A Brief Statement on the Analysis and Evaluation of Works of Art

(Peer-reviewed Journal) Art Style, Art & Culture International Magazine, 2019

[Peer-reviewed article by two scientific committee members of the magazine] This essay seeks to provide an idea of the basis of the main theories of contemporary art criticism. It begins with the assumed knowledge and tradition of the Academies of Fine Art, with their ideal of beauty and classical structure. The importance of such traditional references has its origin in the Renaissance in the 16th century, in Florence with Giorgio Vasari (1511-74), in Haarlem with Karel van Manda (1548-1606) and, above all, in Paris with Charles Lebrun (1619-1690) of the French Royal Academy, which established the first strict rules for the fine arts and was a reference for Europe as a whole. Academies of Fine Art were established in the major European capitals, and from the 19th century, in the Americas and worldwide. The themes and rules presented over the course of history always related to the functions of art and the legacy of classical thought as tradition. However, values and ruptures, ethics, ideologies and political ideals, and the progress of science have conditioned the fundamental importance of the renewal of Western thought. This essay concerns the decline of tradition in the arts, the lack of ideologies guiding modern art, and the transition to contemporary art. The main theories that marked this transition period-20th and 21st century-are analyzed with respect to the art, its criticism, and the theories to the understanding and transformative sense of artistic creation. Such creativity usually appears strange or transgressive to the public and primarily to be seeking a legitimation of the artist's autonomy of choice and freedom of thought. On the whole, this essay presents the main aesthetics notions relating to the critical analysis of traditional European cultures and, more recently, American ones too. American culture, in which the languages of art are based, is analyzed for its effect on occidental philosophy. Both theories of art and contemporary aesthetics are emphasized so as to better understand the work of art's current aim with regard to the discernment of theoretical, prescriptive, and ideological thinking in the visual arts. Cite as: Wagner, Christiane. 2019. “What Matters in Contemporary Art? A Brief Statement on the Analysis and Evaluation of Works of Art.” Art Style, Art & Culture International Magazine, nº 1, (March): 68-82. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5168105

Against Aesthetic Exceptionalism

In this paper I discuss a position I term 'belief pessimism concerning aesthetic testimony' (BP). According to BP (i) judgements of aesthetic value are beliefs and (ii) aesthetic judgements are subject to some additional norm not active with respect to judgements concerning more mundane matters which (inter alia) prevents such judgements from legitimately being formed on the basis of testimony. In this paper I argue that we should reject BP -along with parallel positions which have been proposed in other areas such as judgements of moral value -since it faces a number of pressing objections relating to the nature of belief. Firstly, it proposes a fundamental difference between aesthetic beliefs and beliefs of other kinds without properly motivating this distinction. Secondly, and more fundamentally, BP is in tension with any plausible account of the nature of belief. I conclude, then, that we should reject at least one of (i) or (ii). My own view is that we should accept (i) and reject (ii) but I do not attempt to establish either part of this claim here.