Artistic Value Judgments and the Value of Judging the Arts

Abstract

Why does the frequent spuriousness of artistic value judgments not reduce the widespread demandfor professional art evaluation? In order to answer this question wefirst consider the implications of universally valid principles of art appreciation. It is suggested that the application of these principles for predicting the impact of a work of art requires more information than can normally be obtained by either researchers or art reviewers. Next we review the results of guided interviews conducted with artists, art reviewers and interested laypersons. The findings show that the achievements of professional art reviewing outdo thefallibility of artistic value judgments. It is suggested that this fallibility is a necessary result of the nature of art. Whenever discussing artistic value judgments one cannot help recalling the famous cases of highly esteemed experts severely criticizing a particular work of art that nonetheless was greatly admired for centuries to come. Baglione sharply attacking Caravaggio or Hanslick completely rejecting Wagner's music and taking strong exception to works by Brahms, Bruckner and Wolf are examples from many hundreds. Yet art reviewing is still a flourishing profession. In. more precise terms, the divergencies between the value judgments of different art critics as well as the gulf between the dictum of celebrated experts and the artistic experience of laypersons still pose challenging questions to historians, philosophers, sociologists and psychologists concerned with art. This paper focuses on two questions: (1) Has psychological research into art and art experiences identified factors that are sufficiently stable and common to serve as frames of reference for artistic value judgments or at least to justify art reviewing?; and (2) What can be learned about the function or merit of art reviewing from empirical studies with artistically minded laypersons, artists and art critics? In psychology as well as in physics the terms 'relativity' in general and 'relativity of judgments' in particular do not imply capricious lawlessness. While artistic value judgments seem to depend upon aesthetic biases, personality-induced preferences and culturally-determined values, this is not to say that further research will not eventually reveal the absolute behind the relative, something universal interwoven within the shifting scenes. It can be substantiated by empirical data based on many well-conducted cross-cultural studies carried out with laypersons and experts as well as children, in countries culturally as divergent as the U.S.A., Japan, the Greek Cycladic Islands, the Fiji Islands, different African countries, Northern Greece, Australia (Aborigines) and Vietnam. These findings show considerable agreement in the overall evaluation of artistic products, with the majority of correlations being in the range 0.56 to 0.85. However, the recorded responses of subjects consisted mostly of unspecific statements-like pleasant or unpleasant, good or bad-without providing any indication of factors that did or could account for the observed agreement or