5.1: Aesthetics

Many philosophers believe that there is a distinction between two types of sentence: sentences of fact and sentences of value. Fact sentences or descriptive sentences say how things are. The sky is blue. I am hungry. Value sentences, prescriptive or normative sentences, on the other hand, don’t tell us how things are, but how they ought to be. One sort of value sentence concerns how humans ought to act. That is the purview of ethics, our last chapter. But there is another sort of value sentence that we need to discuss – aesthetic claims. Aesthetics is the study of value judgments concerning art and beauty.

“Does this soup need more barley?” That is an aesthetic question. Would the addition make this object, intentionally created by a human for the sake of artistic appreciation, something that inspires a greater sense of quality? The answer could be yes or no, but either way the person responding would have a reason for it. “The texture is great, adding more would soak up more liquid and it would be too thick. It would feel funny in your mouth.” So, how do we determine what sorts of arguments work and which ones don’t in this kind of matter?

Leo Tolstoy famously drew a distinction between two distinct distinctions concerning art. On the one hand, there is the distinction between art and non-art. On the other hand, there is the distinction between good art and bad art. The first distinction draws the line between those acts which we will consider artistic and those which we do not. This became an important question in the 20th century when modern art was often self-reflexive, that is the subject of much art became art itself. Artists pushed the boundaries, challenging artistic norms and historically accepted rules, trying to force the community to grapple with the boundary between art and non-art.

The French artist, Marcel Duchamp, for example, took mass produced objects, what he called “Readymades,” and displayed them out of context in galleries. His most famous work, “Fountain,” was a urinal displayed as a sculpture. Another, “In Advance of the Broken Arm,” was a snow shovel. These were objects that we had seen many times and not thought about. But now, displayed out of place, they seemed weird. When looking at them, you see them differently. “Why is this here? Really, a urinal?” is where the internal monologue starts. “What could he be saying with this?” it continues, “Is it a 157 political statement about how modern life makes us pissed off? Is it that this is something we do in private and now the thing is displayed publicly, so he’s saying the job of art is to bring the personal out in the open? Is it just a gag? Is he messing with us? Is this even art? I mean, I could place random things around, does that make me an artist? But why this thing?” Art challenges what art is, but what exactly is it? That is a philosophical question.

But it is only one philosophical question. Once we can distinguish art from nonart, we need to think about how we judge art. What makes one piece of art better than another? What makes one thing more beautiful than another?

The temptation is to wave these questions off, to remove them from philosophical discussion by saying that it is all just a matter of taste. It’s subjective. Aesthetic subjectivism is the view that the quality of a work of art is a function of each person and determined only by how much that person likes it. It is absolutely true that there is taste, that is, every person likes different things to different degrees. One need not have any intellectual justification for one’s taste. If chocolate ice cream tastes better to you than vanilla, then it just does. There is no rational argument that can change your mind. It tastes as it does and you just prefer one to the other. End of story.

While there is an instinct to go immediately to that position, it has deep flaws. It is true that we have different tastes, but we also have guilty pleasures. Have you ever liked something, say a television program, that you know is bad? “I know this not good writing, terrible acting, and cheesy special effects, but I just love it.” We all have something that we enjoy, yet know it is of inferior quality. In the other direction, we can admire the artistry of something we don’t enjoy. “I don’t like this kind of music, but I can really hear how good she is with tone, rhythm, and depth of lyrics. I’d never listen to it, but that’s a quality song.” These sorts of claims, of course, only makes sense if we also believe in a distinction between taste (what we like) and quality (what is good).

So, if we want to try to figure out what makes a piece of art good art, the challenge is “who’s to say?” The answer, of course, is we are. You, me, philosophers, people who think hard about these questions.

Some have placed the determination of the quality of the art within the piece itself. Formalism is the view that the aesthetic quality of the work is a function of the formal properties of work. In visual art, the eye prefers symmetry, so questions of 158 balance and geometric structure would be relevant to determining the quality of a painting. Complexity impresses us. If something is intricate and clearly difficult to do, then we elevate the work. Similarly, if the artist misses the mark, we condemn it. If you are listening to a pop song and the drummer is off rhythm or the singer is unintentionally off-key, these would be formal flaws that would make the song lower quality. “That was a terrible rendition of the national anthem, she was flat on some notes and completely missed others. She screeched on the high notes. Oooof. It was terrible.” This is more than “I didn’t like it,” it is justifying panning that performance with reasons that refer to internal elements of the performance itself.

Intentionalism is the view that we cannot judge the quality of the work by only looking at the elements of the work itself, but need to also consider the intention of the artist in creating it. Pablo Picasso’s Guernica is horribly ugly. But that is what makes it such a great work of art. It is meant as a response to the needless killing during World War II. It is intended to illustrate the ugliness we have shown toward fellow humans. If you didn’t know that this was Picasso’s intention, you could not properly appreciate the work.

it, we taste it (culinary art only – don’t try licking paintings in the art museum, please). But artist’s intentions are not on display. They are in the head of the artist. We cannot know what was intended. The artist herself may not even know. And if the artist is dead…now we have no chance of legitimately gaining access to this information.

So, formalism puts the important aspects of judgment in the work and intentionalism puts it in the mind of the artist, there is one more place it could be – in the experience of the audience. Aesthetic expressivism is the view that the job of art is to express and evoke human emotion. If a sad song makes you cry, it was a good song. If a movie leaves you uplifted and inspired, it was a quality film. The work of art is meant to move the audience and if the audience is moved, then it did its job.

A competing view that looks at the reaction of the audience to the work is aesthetic cognitivism. Aesthetic cognitivism is the view that works of art make us think, they convey ideas. The more intellectually affective a piece is, the better it is. Immanuel Kant famously distinguished between two sorts of reaction we can have to art. On the one hand, we can think it beautiful. Beauty is when we lose ourselves within 159 the qualities of the work. “Oh my gosh, this is so delicious, I can’t stop eating it. I’m completely stuffed, but I still want more.” A work is beautiful when we appreciate it fully for what it is. It draws us in and we want to stay focused on it. “That is so beautiful, I can’t look away.”

On the other hand, Kant argues, some art is sublime. Something is sublime when it takes us beyond it and beyond ourselves. The beautiful allows us to get drawn in and appreciate thing itself, the sublime blows everything up and puts us in touch with something higher, bigger than ourselves, beyond our own limited perspective. Religious art is intended to take us beyond our own mind to a sense of awe associated with the Divine.

Let’s turn our gaze from religious art to ethnic and dirty jokes. We will consider a question in humor aesthetics – what makes a joke a good joke. Comic moralism is the view that jokes with morally problematic elements are less funny for being immoral. Comic immoralism is the view that immoral content makes a joke funnier. Comic amoralism contends that the quality of a joke is irrelevant to the moral status of its content. Does the ethical status of the content of the joke matter?