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 will be 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

paper, 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
1
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, that even among artworks that have aesthetic value, their

value as art is not exhausted by their aesthetic value. Both thoughts suggest 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, Dom Lopes has recently argued that there is no coherent notion of

non-aesthetic artistic value that is not trivial, that can distinguish between what makes

works valuable as art and adventitious values those works also possess.3

The main purpose of this paper is to present arguments for the existence of artistic

value and to provide a viable, non-trivial conception of such value. Since Lopes offers the

1
most direct arguments against artistic value, I will next evaluate these and show that my

proposals evade them. Finally I will challenge the one positive proposal Lopes makes in

his paper. For the sake of concision, henceforth, when I speak of artistic value, I will

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.

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
2
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 later to redirect

the focus of art from matters aesthetic to ideas of various kinds. It would be over-

simplistic to claim that no works made within these movements have aesthetic value, but

the thought is either: some of these works completely lack aesthetic interest yet are

valuable as art, or, more modestly, 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 to properties, including aesthetic properties, but also social and art historical

2
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 non-aesthetic 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 we engage with artworks and

with art’s engagement with the world. Noel Carroll’s “Art and Interaction” is an example
3
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 non-aesthetic 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. Hence artworks must have value as art that goes beyond

their aesthetic value. Hence, there is non-aesthetic artistic value.

3
 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.
4
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’

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 its

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.

4
 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. Regarding the first argument, one could try to argue that

aesthetic value wholly accounts for the value of avant-garde works when evaluated as art,
5
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 species of

aesthetic value. All of these positions have been argued but, 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 don’t 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 non-aesthetic artistic value. We

can say something stronger. They entail that if there is artistic value at all, there is non-

5
aesthetic artistic value. Lopes, in arguing that we cannot specify the referent of the

expression ‘(non-aesthetic) artistic value’ in a non-trivial 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 non-aesthetic artistic value from non-artistic of value

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.

6
However, I think there is a way to specify artistic value. So I now turn to how it

can be done.

Artistic Value Specified

The immediate challenge is to find a way to distinguish non-aesthetic 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 non-aesthetic 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 non-aesthetic artistic value does not require a definition of

such value). Nevertheless, it would be good to have a deeper understanding of the nature

6
of artistic value and the way being artistically valuable is related to being valuable as a

painting, etc.

How does one distinguish artistic value from non-artistic values 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, one needs 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

7
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 don’t 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 eliminates 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

7
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 towards 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.

8
On the other hand, such understanding is not required to appreciate adventitious

valuable properties of artworks. This is obvious for the ability of a painting to cover a

whole 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 why some works are

financially more valuable than others at a given time, and 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

8
while those qualities remain constant, which shows that no matter how well we

understand a work that will never be sufficient to gage 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, i.e., 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 not

artistically better. On the other hand, when we classify works as original, we usually
9
don’t merely mean 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, but also perhaps providing new knowledge of what we

see.

Second, consider naturalistic novels like The Jungle by Upton Sinclair and

Germinal by 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 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

9
engaged in this way, when it succeeds in virtue of its literary properties such as vivid

description, then this is an artistic virtue which requires 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 non-artistic. However, it not clear that this example constitutes a
10
genuine counter-example 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 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 non-artistic.

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

10
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
11
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’m 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 don’t

just find aesthetic value in them because some works we value highly as art lack

11
significant aesthetic value and many works that do have significant aesthetic value are

valued as art for other properties they possess. So as long we can carve off adventitious

values, what’s the problem? Why should the result trivialize value as art?

Lopes thinks that it does 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 just because a work is, say, therapeutic doesn’t 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?
12
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’m 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 time16, and despite some attempts, mentioned

earlier, to revive it, it remains a minority view. The majority view is that knowing what

art is won’t provide knowledge of artistic value. This suggests that we need a non-

essentialist 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

12
belong. But even those functions change, and what changes them are artist’s intentions

(and perhaps we should add, changing cultural expectations). Given a non-essentialist

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 won’t 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.

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 we have attempted to defuse in

the last section. The second is the art form strategy. This strategy argues that there are no
13
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 we don’t appreciate objects as artworks

and don’t discover artistic achievements in understanding artist’s projects. If this is so, it

would undercut the arguments and the test for artistic value given above.

However, 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

13
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’s 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 question about its artistic

value. When we encounter photographs of photographs in an art world context, we don’t

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

14
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, etc. 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

14
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 don't 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 painting, 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
15
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, etc. This conclusion is

further supported by Lope’s one positive proposal, to which I now turn.

Artistic Value as Aesthetic Value

Lopes 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 don’t belong to

an art kind but possess artistic value. Consider items like carpets, quilts, or furniture.

15
Some of these items can be so beautiful, expressive, or meaningful that we literally (not

merely honorifically) count them 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. Couldn’t we 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
16
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

16
media, but it can’t 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.

Conciliatory Gestures

Toward the end of his paper, Lopes makes a couple of remarks that seem

conciliatory toward advocates of artistic value. 1. “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, than I wonder why Lopes denies the existence of (non-
17
aesthetic) 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. 2. “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.

17
 Let me make some conciliatory gestures too. I think Lopes sees that the only

viable conception of non-aesthetic artistic value would be a non-essentialist one. We

agree about this. We also agree that some of these non-aesthetic 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 that argued that it can’t;

Lopes thinks that it can. We also disagree on whether there is a satisfactory account of

non-aesthetic artistic value that distinguishes it from value in art. I have argued that there

is; Lopes thinks there is not. 24

18
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.

NOTES

1. Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism. New York: Harcourt, Brace

and World, 1958 and the essays contained in The Aesthetic Point of View. Ithaca, NY:

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, Ithaca: Cornell

Universiy Press, 2004 and Nick Zangwill, Aesthetic Creation, Oxford: Oxford University

18
Press, 2007. I have critiqued these proposal in the following publications: “Aesthetic

Creation and Artistic Value,” Art and Philosophy (Poland), 35, 2009, 68-82, “Review of

“The Aesthetic Function of Art,” Philosophical Review, 116, no. 1, 2007, and Aesthetics

and the Philosophy of Art, 2nd Ed., Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2010, 233-36

(Henceforth: Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art).

3. Dominic Lopes, “The Myth of (Non-Aesthetic) Artistic Value,” The Philosophical

Quarterly, 61 , 2011, 518-36. (Henceforth: Myth)

4. Robert Stecker, Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art, 233-34.

5. Noël Carroll, “Art and Interaction,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 45, 1986,

57-68.

6. This argument is adapted from an argument from Danto about the nature of art. See
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Arthur Danto, “The Artworld,” Journal of Philosophy, 61, 1964, 571-84. 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,

Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard University Press, 1981.

7. Myth 519.

8. Peter Lamarque, Work and Object: Explorations in the Metaphysics of Art, Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 2010, 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,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 50, 1992: 117-29 and James Shelley, “The

Problem of Non-perceptual Art,” British Journal of Aesthetics 43, 2002: 363-78 argue

that value of avant-garde works can be understood in aesthetic terms. Malcom Budd’s

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Values of Art: Pictures, Poetry Music, London: The Penguin Press, 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, 221-46 for rebuttals of all these attempts.

10. Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art, 240.

11. In 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, edited by Michael Krausz, College Park, Penn State Press, 2002,

285-306.

13. Myth 520. Adopted from Nicholas Wolterstorff, Art in Action, Grand Rapids:
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Eerdman, 1980, 157.

14. Myth 520n.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. Myth 521.

16. Beginning especially with the work of Arthur Danto and George Dickie. See Danto,

Transfiguration of the Common Place, , and Dickie, Art and the Aesthetic, Ithaca: Cornell

University Press, 1974.

17. I have argued for a non-essentialist 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 221-246.

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18. Alan Goldman argues that we make such comparisons in Aesthetic Value. Boulder,

CO.: Westview Press, 1995.

19. Myth 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 "Is Architecture

an Art?" In Philosophy and Architecture, ed. Michael Mitias. Amsterdam and Atlanta:

Editions Rodopi, 1995.

21. Myth 535.

22. Myth 535.

23. Lopes, Sight and Sensibity: Evaluating Pictures, Oxford: Oxford University Press,

2005, 5.
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24. For helpful comments I thank Stephen Davies, Andrew Huddleston, Paisley

Livingston, and Dom Lopes.

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