The Value of Art
Why do we think that art is important? We share the view that it has a profundity that merits our special attention. We also think that art has a value that sits uneasily with our usual property rules of resource allocation, because it seems some great works of art cannot really be owned in the ordinary way.
Art shares, with some other objects, a special status, which requires decisions about the distribution and ownership of art works to be made differently from normal arguments about individual or community rights to property.
Art as feelings
“The activity of art is based on the fact that a man receiving through his sense of hearing or sight another man”s expression of feeling, is capable of experiencing the emotion which moved the man who expressed it. To take the simple example: one man laughs and another, who hears, becomes merry; or a man weeps and another, who hears, feels sorrow. A man is excited or irritated, and another man, seeing him, is brought to a similar state of mind. By his movements or by the sounds of his voice a man expresses courage and determination or sadness and calmness, and this state of mind passes on to others.”
Leo Tolstoy
Art as akin to moral appreciation
“Taste makes, as it were, the transition from the charm of sense to habitual moral interest possible without too violent a leap, for it represents the imagination, even in its freedom, as amenable to a final determination for understanding, and teaches us to find, even in sensuous objects, a free delight apart from any charm of sense.”
Immanuel Kant, the famed founder of deontology thought that the value of art was akin to moral appreciation and capable of expressing our highest aspirations.
Nietzsche ridiculed Kant here -
“Kant thought he was doing art an honour by pushing to the forefront as predicates of the beautiful those characteristics which constituted the glory of knowledge: impersonality and universal validity… the only thing I wish to emphasize is that Kant, instead of viewing the aesthetic problem from the experience of the artist (the creator) like all philosophers considered art and the beautiful exclusively from the point of view of the “spectator”...But if only the philosophers of the beautiful had been sufficiently familiar with this “spectator” at least!” ... Stendhal once described the beautiful as une promesse de bonheur. Here in any case the very aspect of the ascetic condition which Kant emphasized at the expense of all others – le desinteressement - is rejected and crossed out. Who is right, Kant or Stendhal? – If our aestheticians admittedly never tire of arguing on Kant”s behalf that under the spell of beauty it is possible to contemplate even statues of naked women “without interest” one is entitled to have a little laugh at their expense...”
Art as possessing intrinsic or sacred value
“The idea of intrinsic value is commonplace, and it has a central place in our shared scheme of values and opinions...[s]omething is intrinsically valuable … if its value is independent of what people happen to enjoy of want or need or what is good for them”
Dworkin
Ronald Dworkin postulates that art has “intrinsic” value, meaning that art is valuable in itself, and independent of what people enjoy, or want, or what is good for them. We can describe this kind of value in different ways. We can say, for example, that art is “inviolable”, meaning that something important is lost by its destruction. Horror at the destruction of the giant Buddha in Afghanistan by the Taliban is not dependent on the loss of pleasure that we ourselves would have gained from it – for I can feel that horror, without contemplating that I might ever have seen it.
Art and the enrichment of a community”s life: Competitive values
“Since it is reasonable to suppose that governments have duties towards its citizens to protect their interests equally, it is useful to contrast the idea of intrinsic value with that of the protection of those interests through rights.
The contrast of the value of rights, with intrinsic value, is instructive…the duties we have to protect people”s rights are different from the sorts of duties we have towards those things that have intrinsic value. You and I do not have a right that all Matisse”s works continue to exist…The logic of rights works differently. People have rights not to be murdered because to murder a person is to violate their interest in continuing to live.
A useful analogy is with the cultural experience of our language, the existence of which has the same intrinsic quality. ..There are sufficient reasons, other than the strictly utilitarian, for making the study of English compulsory in schools…it is a distinct gain when the English language absorbs new influences and creates new words, or new meanings for old words. Art is the same. It is impossible to imagine life in our community today without art, and art”s influences, about us, shaping the way we perceive the world. ..
Art [has a] “sacred” quality. Although intrinsic value cannot be defined in terms of the interests it serves, objects having intrinsic value will often be valuable and integral parts of human culture. Since governments have duties arising from a general duty to enhance the freedom and development of their citizens, they have duties to encourage as much richness and diversity in their communities, as well as, so far as it is legitimate to do so, in the world community.”
Stephen Guest
Guest thus has a very Millean libertarian argument and assumes a causal connection between diversity and human progress. He makes a more elaborate, but nonetheless essentially Dworkinian argument
Whom do you believe? Personally, I don't value art and hence am an external observer in the Hartian sense. That is why although analytically I have my own inclinations, I do not feel that I am in a position to comment.
Art shares, with some other objects, a special status, which requires decisions about the distribution and ownership of art works to be made differently from normal arguments about individual or community rights to property.
Art as feelings
“The activity of art is based on the fact that a man receiving through his sense of hearing or sight another man”s expression of feeling, is capable of experiencing the emotion which moved the man who expressed it. To take the simple example: one man laughs and another, who hears, becomes merry; or a man weeps and another, who hears, feels sorrow. A man is excited or irritated, and another man, seeing him, is brought to a similar state of mind. By his movements or by the sounds of his voice a man expresses courage and determination or sadness and calmness, and this state of mind passes on to others.”
Leo Tolstoy
Art as akin to moral appreciation
“Taste makes, as it were, the transition from the charm of sense to habitual moral interest possible without too violent a leap, for it represents the imagination, even in its freedom, as amenable to a final determination for understanding, and teaches us to find, even in sensuous objects, a free delight apart from any charm of sense.”
Immanuel Kant, the famed founder of deontology thought that the value of art was akin to moral appreciation and capable of expressing our highest aspirations.
Nietzsche ridiculed Kant here -
“Kant thought he was doing art an honour by pushing to the forefront as predicates of the beautiful those characteristics which constituted the glory of knowledge: impersonality and universal validity… the only thing I wish to emphasize is that Kant, instead of viewing the aesthetic problem from the experience of the artist (the creator) like all philosophers considered art and the beautiful exclusively from the point of view of the “spectator”...But if only the philosophers of the beautiful had been sufficiently familiar with this “spectator” at least!” ... Stendhal once described the beautiful as une promesse de bonheur. Here in any case the very aspect of the ascetic condition which Kant emphasized at the expense of all others – le desinteressement - is rejected and crossed out. Who is right, Kant or Stendhal? – If our aestheticians admittedly never tire of arguing on Kant”s behalf that under the spell of beauty it is possible to contemplate even statues of naked women “without interest” one is entitled to have a little laugh at their expense...”
Art as possessing intrinsic or sacred value
“The idea of intrinsic value is commonplace, and it has a central place in our shared scheme of values and opinions...[s]omething is intrinsically valuable … if its value is independent of what people happen to enjoy of want or need or what is good for them”
Dworkin
Ronald Dworkin postulates that art has “intrinsic” value, meaning that art is valuable in itself, and independent of what people enjoy, or want, or what is good for them. We can describe this kind of value in different ways. We can say, for example, that art is “inviolable”, meaning that something important is lost by its destruction. Horror at the destruction of the giant Buddha in Afghanistan by the Taliban is not dependent on the loss of pleasure that we ourselves would have gained from it – for I can feel that horror, without contemplating that I might ever have seen it.
Art and the enrichment of a community”s life: Competitive values
“Since it is reasonable to suppose that governments have duties towards its citizens to protect their interests equally, it is useful to contrast the idea of intrinsic value with that of the protection of those interests through rights.
The contrast of the value of rights, with intrinsic value, is instructive…the duties we have to protect people”s rights are different from the sorts of duties we have towards those things that have intrinsic value. You and I do not have a right that all Matisse”s works continue to exist…The logic of rights works differently. People have rights not to be murdered because to murder a person is to violate their interest in continuing to live.
A useful analogy is with the cultural experience of our language, the existence of which has the same intrinsic quality. ..There are sufficient reasons, other than the strictly utilitarian, for making the study of English compulsory in schools…it is a distinct gain when the English language absorbs new influences and creates new words, or new meanings for old words. Art is the same. It is impossible to imagine life in our community today without art, and art”s influences, about us, shaping the way we perceive the world. ..
Art [has a] “sacred” quality. Although intrinsic value cannot be defined in terms of the interests it serves, objects having intrinsic value will often be valuable and integral parts of human culture. Since governments have duties arising from a general duty to enhance the freedom and development of their citizens, they have duties to encourage as much richness and diversity in their communities, as well as, so far as it is legitimate to do so, in the world community.”
Stephen Guest
Guest thus has a very Millean libertarian argument and assumes a causal connection between diversity and human progress. He makes a more elaborate, but nonetheless essentially Dworkinian argument
Whom do you believe? Personally, I don't value art and hence am an external observer in the Hartian sense. That is why although analytically I have my own inclinations, I do not feel that I am in a position to comment.
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