Does Art Have Moral Value, and If so, Is Such Value Relevant to Its Assessment as Art?

Tiffany Horan

How do we assess the moral value of art? In order to determine whether or not art has a moral
value, we must first find a definition of art to agree on for the purpose of this essay.

“A perfect work of art will be one in which the content is important and significant to
all men, and therefore it will be moral. The expression will be quite clear, intelligible
to all, and therefore beautiful; the author’s relation to his work will be altogether
sincere and heartfelt, and therefore true.”

(Tolstoy, L., 1960, p. 64)

If I was to say “art is in some way an interpretation of the human condition, expressed in a
manner considered to be art by the artist” (Horan, 2011) then anything created with the
purpose of being considered art by the artist, regardless of concept or content, is art. If we
take the quote from Tolstoy and think of art that may be sincere, heartfelt and true to the artist
but not to the audience, we can begin to consider art which is the opposite of this. A form of
art that is not significant to all men, art that is not clear, not intelligible to all. Surely the
subjectivity of art in itself means that no work of art will ever be or has ever been significant,
clear and intelligible to all, there has never been nor will there ever be a single work of art,
universally appreciated. No one work of art will appeal to all people without criticism.
Questionable content or art which lacks typical moral values within contemporary art is
usually encouraged and positively acknowledged as it often allows an artist to respond to and
approach difficult topics in such a way that the audience has no choice but to carefully
consider the content of the work. The supposed ‘moralless’ artist will often provide an
explanation, a concept, a reason for the works existence, which again adds not only to the
aesthetic experience of the audience but to the work itself; it strengthens the artist’s relation
to their own work.

The value of art usually depends on the merit of the artist, so when the merit of the artist is
questioned, the work usually loses its value. The merit of the artist implies that the quality of
their work is particularly good or worthy of an audience, according to the art world, or the art
market. Moral values affect artistic integrity. By integrity, I am referring to the honesty of the
artist and any strong moral principles in relation to the authenticity of their work. If one
cannot trust an artist’s integrity, the moral value of their work no longer exists. An artwork
without moral values, without integrity, is still an artwork. A recent example of this would be
the artist Graham Ovenden. His work was removed from The Tate’s online collection and
will no longer be shown in any of its galleries due to its lack of moral value, as determined by
those with the power to decide what is or is not appropriate for Tate audiences, both online
and offline. Moral value that was lost when the artist’s blatant hypocrisy was uncovered.
Ovenden’s work featured images of young girls that were deemed inappropriate to be
displayed as art once the artist had been convicted of “a string of child sex offences”
(Anderson, 2013). These images were not considered inappropriate prior to discovering the
artist’s previous ulterior motives. The nude images were no longer considered artistic,
thought provoking, beautiful, innocent or natural. Instead, they became something else,
something sordid. His actions were morally wrong and his work suffered in moral value as a
consequence of this. However, the work was still originally produced to be viewed as art by
the artist himself and therefore does not cease to be art. It is now art without moral value and
could simply be viewed as being bad art. “Kant writes that ‘the beautiful is the symbol of the
morally good.’” (Cooper, D.E. ed., 1992) Using Ovenden’s work as an example, it is clear
that what Kant is saying is not necessarily true when we think of people who once found
Ovenden’s work beautiful, for although the images were considered beautiful and not
immoral, they are now a symbol of the morally bad and according to Kant’s view these works
are no longer beautiful. However, in the end Tate has taken on the Kantian approach to the
works, finding them both immoral and not beautiful. They reflect a beauty we are aware of,
that of youth, of a young girl but not in a way we would normally associate with such an
image as it has become sexualised, no longer reflecting youth, no longer reflecting the beauty
of the model but instead reflecting the perversion of the artist.

“Philosophers like Beardsley, for whom the aesthetic is an autonomous domain, are
encompassed in Stuart Hampshire’s remark that, for them, ‘the enjoyment of art, and
art itself, is … a detached and peculiar pleasure, which leads to nothing else. Its part
in the whole experience of man is then left unexplained.’ (Hampshire, 1959, p. 246).
This comment might also apply to G.E. Moore, whose view of the connection
between meeting ones moral obligations and aesthetic enjoyments is that the former is
a means to the latter as well as to personal affection, both of which ends are the
greatest intrinsic goods. (Moore, 1971, ch. 6)”

(Cooper, D.E. ed., 1992)

There are a number of contemporary artists who work with controversial imagery, images
that when compared to the work of Ovenden (before his conviction), appear much more
graphic and overtly perverse. What is it that makes such an extreme form of art no longer
suggestive of a lack of moral value? How is it possible that the image of a nude child by
Ovenden is worse than a sculpture that at a glance, appears to depict several. Could it be that
the extreme nature of works by artists such as Jake and Dinos Chapman cause us to no longer
associate their work with the human condition, as their work appears so non-human, so
detached from our own reality. Their 1995 work Zygotic Acceleration, Biogenetic, De-
Sublimated Libidinal Model (Enlarged x 1000) is often misread as the sculpture appears to
depict nude, gender neutral children with facial deformations resembling genitalia. It appears
particularly grotesque, a sort of macabre reoccurring joke between the two brothers’ works.
This tends to cause most people to see the work as a comment on immorality, of children
growing up too fast, of innocence lost, of child abuse. The art work is not a comment on any
of these things; these are things the viewer is placing on the art work because they are in
shock, their inability to understand what they see is causing them to associate with what they
know, what they think they see. In an interview by David Barrett for Royal Jelly Factory, the
Chapman brothers state that “if you look at our work and think about child abuse, then that
would have to be in your mind before you looked at it. You have a matrix of knowledge, of
references, before you understand anything, because when you look at something your mind
compares it to prior experience in order to understand it.” (Chapman, J. & Chapman, D. n.d.)
Morally, Zygotic Acceleration, Biogenetic, De-Sublimated Libidinal Model (Enlarged x
1000) has a higher value than say an image by Ovenden, as it is not about what you see
initially, aesthetically, it is how what you see makes you feel; thus making it a better work of
art in comparison. The higher the moral value, the higher the artistic integrity, the higher the
merit of the artist and the better the work of art.

“The composer Pierre Boulez said: "It is not enough to deface the Mona Lisa because
that does not kill the Mona Lisa. All the art of the past must be destroyed." Out of that
urge, great work can be made. Structure creates expectation, answer will follow
question.”

(Yorke, 2013)

In the past, there have been many instances where art has been deemed immoral and unfit for
display, where it was put away, hidden from public view or completely destroyed. Such
decisions were not the result of court cases, convictions and the poor moral judgement of the
artists. They were the result of those in power. They were decisions made solely on what a
group of people thought was either good or bad art. Questioning the moral value of art and
the integrity of the artists who created it was in part responsible for the events that took place
during World War II. The Nazi’s began to make their way into all levels of German society;
they forcibly attempted to take control of everything, with specific emphasis on the creative
industries. They believed that the artists themselves were suffering from mental illness and as
a result were producing immoral works of art. These artists were seen as instigators of
cultural bolshevism, with particular blame falling on the heads of Jewish individuals. The
artwork produced by these now segregated artists was known as ‘degenerate art’ and seen as
being intellectually and spiritually corrupt. Although the works were put on display, it is clear
that in order to separate this art from that of none degenerate artists, the exhibition was
intentionally uncurated and claustrophobic. The display was presented in such a careless
manner in order to reflect the Nazis opinion of the artists and the low moral value of the
work. Some of the paintings were left unframed; they were not hung but plastered all over the
graffiti scrawled walls, hung upside down. Once the works were removed from display, they
were then burnt as a warning that this kind of art was unacceptable. The moral value of the
destroyed work was influenced by the Nazis perceptions of the artists, yet to those who were
not Nazis, the moral value of the work remained the same. The Nazis opinion of what was or
was not immoral was not shared universally. This allows us to understand that in order for us
to assess the moral value of an art work, we must first be able to distance ourselves from our
own opinions, in order to produce a more receptive response to what is or is not art based on
the works universal moral value. A large number of the degenerate artworks were by
expressionist painters, both light and dark amongst the vibrancy of the colours and distorted
figures, experiential works intended to evoke thought and emotion, works which portrayed a
vast array of subjective interpretations and ideas; they were not depicting the natural world
but an inner world, a world that was not discussed or represented in art at that time,
psychological landscapes and internal monologues. Anyone who was found teaching as a
degenerate artist, or was thought of as supporters of so-called degenerate artists was stripped
of their positions in education. Some artists were bereft of their right to create. To take away
the brush of an artist and tell him he is no longer allowed to be an artist is to severe a limb,
perhaps to severe several, to create a handicap. To remove something as necessary as the
ability to create, means that the artist’s survival is jeopardised, no longer capable of living a
normal life, no longer willing to try without it as their true calling, themselves removed,
oppressed, distant and forced into depression. The majority took their own lives or were
never the same again, especially when one considers the development of expressionist
paintings after the war. The term provided the Nazis with a title for an exhibition that went by
the same name, ‘Degenerate Art’ which took place in 1937. An American art student
travelling through Germany at the time recalls her experience of the exhibition:

“I had heard nothing about this degenerate art exhibition, I stumbled on to it … So, I
was walking on the street and I saw the banner over the door, went inside, rickety
staircase, I went up and then I almost bumped my head on the knee of the great
wooden Christ by Gies. They’d hung it on the landing in such a way that you had to
get around it when originally it had been hung high in the Lübeck Cathedral. I turned
off the landing and saw pictures crowded together, some on burlap, some crooked,
badly lighted.”

(Josephine Knapp, 1993)

Paul Schultze-Naumburg, one of the Defence Guild’s most influential members, gave
efficacious talks, convincing people of a link between artistic aberration and physical
deformities or degeneration. He did this by comparing images of deformed human beings
taken from medical journals and supplied to him by doctors to images of human beings as
depicted in modern art. A powerful notion which scared the Nazis was the fact that modern
art “is largely free of the didactic and moral preoccupations of older art.” (Coleman, E.J. ed.,
1983, p. 9) Modern art was characterised as a selfish activity, they wanted to control it. In
modern art, one does not paint what one sees, one paints what one feels, how things really
are, as opposed to how they appear. Schultze-Naumburg believed that art was to be a mirror
of racial health and that modernism was a symptom, a disease. He expected Nazi art to
contain similar imagery to that of Greek or Renaissance art, images of impossible ideals,
superior perfection, of strength and well-proportioned individuals completely free from any
natural human flaws. Sculptors were hired to create a new kind of man, an image as a goal for
the Nazis to idealise. In reference to Kant and his reduction of art into two possibilities, it
would appear that the Nazis believed they were intending to create work that imitated natural
beauty, or what they blindly considered to be a natural beauty, based on an idealisation. Yet
to an outsider it would appear that they were in fact creating works intentionally directed
towards their own satisfaction, they’re own fictional concepts and notions of what is or is not
beautiful, what should or should not be considered a work of art.
 “Perhaps some of the most repulsive examples which should illustrate the decadence
and degeneration of modernist art may be found in the work Kunst und Rasse (Art
and Race), published by the architect Paul Schultze-Naumburg in 1928, in which he
argued that only "racially pure" artists could produce a healthy art which upheld
timeless ideals of classical beauty, while racially "mixed" modern artists evidenced
their inferiority and corruption by producing distorted artwork.”

(Ranta, 2010)

Tolstoy argued that ‘true art’ must do more than simply exist for enjoyment. He saw art as
something that should unite people “into one universal brotherhood” (Tolstoy, L., 1960, p.
146) which unfortunately, the Nazis were also trying to achieve, to a certain extent. The
Nazis however, were attempting to use art as an excuse for what most people would view as
being immoral hygienics, art hygiene and racial hygiene seeming to go hand in hand. Unlike
Tolstoy Nazis were not focusing on a universal brotherhood but on a brotherhood that
consisted of the German people and themselves. By censoring art based on their moralistic
views, they were assessing the moral value of the artworks in the same way that after his
conviction, we assessed the moral values of Graham Ovenden’s work. This is not to say that
the Nazis had the right to censor the work of degenerate, Bolshevik artists but they did it in
order to protect their moral values from the content of the work, in the same way that Tate
chose to protect their moral values by removing the work of a convicted paedophile, a move
also made based on the content of the work in relation to opinions of the artist. It would
appear that the reasons for assessing the moral value of art through aesthetic experience and
censorship of such experiences enables us to live better lives by limiting our exposure to that
which is thought of generally as being morally wrong. There is no justification for morality to
be used as a form of censorship within art yet it is persistently used in assessing the moral
value and the quality of a work of art.

References and Bibliography

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Moore, G.E. (1971) Principia Ethica Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Yorke, J. (2013) ‘Everything you ever needed to know about screenwriting (but were afraid
to ask)’ The Independent [Online]. Available from: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-
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Anderson, S. (2013) ‘Tate removes more than 30 Graham Ovenden works from collection
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http://tiffanyhoran.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/theory.html (Accessed: 4th April 2013)

Chapman, J. & Chapman, D. (n.d.) ‘Jake & Dinos Chapman Interview’ Royal Jelly Factory
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