The Interaction of Ethics and Aesthetics in Environmental Art

Abstract

This article advances and defends three claims: (1) that the proper ethical criticism of environmental art requires a production-oriented approach-an approach that appraises the ethical merits or flaws of the work in terms of how the artwork is created as well as the consequences of its creation; (2) that, depending on contextual factors, ethical flaws in environmental artworks may, but do not necessarily, constitute aesthetic flaws in those works; (3) that, because environmental artworks appropriate part of the environment as an aspect of their identity, an aesthetic flaw in an environmental artwork necessarily also creates aesthetic disvalue in the environment-disvalue that exists in virtue of the creation of the artwork. I conclude with one further, more speculative claim, which deserves further investigation: the aesthetic flaws of an environmental artwork, which result in aesthetic flaws in the natural environment itself, are always ethical flaws of the artwork. This seems to make environmental art distinctive; in the case of non-environmental art, aesthetic flaws do not necessarily (if ever) constitute ethical flaws.