A Cluster Account of Art Evaluation

Abstract

Almost all philosophers who thought about the evaluation of the work of art were limited by one condition: the specific value of an artwork had to be different from any other kind of value (historical, emotional, moral, etc.). If we look very closely at them, these theories of art evaluation are partly also theories of art definition. On the other hand, in the theories of art evaluation there is to be found a constant obssession for the discovery of some criteria in the evaluation that takes the form of universal positive sentences. In this paper I advance, explain and defend, using as a starting point Gaut’s cluster account on the definition of art, a cluster account of art evaluation, developed as a relative theory of evaluation, in the sense that a specific work of art is evaluated according to the artistic context in which it has been created. This theory starts from the premise that when we evaluate a particular work of art we already know that object is an artwork and we evaluate it as such, and the artistic object’s evaluation is made not by using a strong principle, but by using a number of weak principles, which are not jointly necessary, but are disjunctively necessary for a work of art to have sufficient value as to be considered a good work of art.