Distinguishing Justifications and Explanations in Judgments of Art

Abstract

One ongoing activity in teaching is the bestowing of values upoii art works. might be said that students can study art in order to learn about the relationship between art objects and value statements attributed to them. In such study, one of the most frequent questions students ask about art is, Why is the work of value?' educational purpose of exploring questions is to understand what about art is valued and upon what grounds the evaluation of a work rests. Oftentimes, if students learn the former without understanding the latter, they are merely being indoctrinated or conditioned to accept the values of another. In order to understand the values associated with art, students must learn to understand the evidence which supports these values. Such evidence has traditionally been sought by analyzing the characteristics of a work of art. In this paper, I shall argue that there is more than one question which must be accounted for in understanding judgments of art. Evidence which supports claims involving different questions cannot be found exclusively in the work. Consequently, relying solely on the characteristics of an art object as a basis for concluding why the work is of value is educationally misleading. Such judgments do not account for the role of people in establishing criteria for why art objects are valued. people-object relationship, however, is the foundation upon which an understanding of the evaluation of art is constructed. emphasis upon the work of art as a source of evidence to support value claims is suggested in the often cited distinction between preferences and judgments of art (Ecker, 1967). Preferences are likes, values, or attitudes which are attributed to a work. Although they may be elicited by the features of a work, they indicate more about a viewer's dispositions towards a work of art than the work of art itself. Preferences are based on psychological reports, e.g. The work of art feels good or reminds me of X, rather than on an analysis of features of a work. Hence, differences in preferences are not reconciled by appealing to such features. In contrast, judgments of value are supported often by evidence observed in the work. If two people in a gallery disagree about the value of a work, they may look, for example, at the order or lack of order in the work to determine why it is either good or bad. Accordingly, one of the viewers might support his or her judgment of the goodness of the work by pointing to the curving line which permeates the picture and holds together everything in its path. Thus, the distinction between preferences and judgments enables a viewer to dislike a work which is judged to be good without being selfcontradictory, e.g., It is a good painting but I do not like it. Paul Ziff (1962) has underscored the need to base statements concerning the value of a work on what can be observed in the work. Ziff contends that nothing can be a reason why a painting is good or bad unless it is concerned with what can be looked at in the painting, unless it is concerned with what can, in some sense, be seen (p. 162). emphasis on citing the observable characteristics of a work as evidence to support value judgments frequently leads to the use of formalistic reasons as to why a work is good, e.g., it is good because it is balanced. For instance, if one considers the examples cited by Ziff of evidence supporting value judgments in his article, Reasons in Art Criticism (1962), it will be found that they are exclusively formal, for he considers the function of criticism to call attention to the form of works of art. This emphasis is consistent with the propensity for formalism which is reflected in contemporary art and in contemporary art criticism (Greenberg, 1978). question of why a work is judged to be good, involves more than one kind of