Art & the Stubborn Reality of Subjective Value (Part 1)

A thesis arguing that conservatives are unreasonably frightened by subjectivity. An explanation of why and how they became like that. And a defense of the subjective element in art appreciation.

I remember exactly where I was the first time I decided to spend a whole day looking at classic paintings. I was 24-years old, and I wanted to be “cultured.” That’s why I did it. I had a few prejudices—and had seen some of the famous paintings through the course of my life. But I didn’t yet have an aesthetic sense. None of it really moved me emotionally. Two quick digressions:

• Art and the aesthetic ought never to be separated: and of course, aesthetic means “feeling,” or sensing, which is why when you go to get a tooth drilled at the dentist, they give you the opposite thing: anesthetic.

• Consider the third binary in the Myers-Briggs test: Sensing vs. Intuition. Part of my implied argument here is that art calls all of us into the sensuous, and many people are by their nature not inclined to enjoy that. They prefer having immediate intuitions about art, and they approach art with their intuitions all “in place.” When an intuitive person encounters a piece of art, he is already thinking about how this piece can be fit into his overall understanding of things, what it means for the future, etc. Perhaps more on this later.

Last month, I saw a demoralizing story about how “already” people have begun to prefer A.I.-generated art (and poetry!) to human-generated art. Here’s one of the reports about the recent research. In summary, humans have a strong expressed preference for human-made art, but when put to the test, they can’t identify which is human and which is algorithmic:

Here’s one more article if you want to put your discernment to the test.

All of this should provoke a sequence of challenging questions for the earnest seeker of truth. Certainly we have to inquire, what is art? Is art defined by (and valued for) what it provokes in viewers, or is it an object that relates, by careful craft, to ideal forms? The traditional conservative might reject the claim that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” because he takes that to mean that anything can be art—or that no shared aesthetic judgment is possible. But what would it even mean for beauty to exist objectively, apart from the appreciation of viewers? And: is there a possible third position beyond merely subjective and objective theories of value?

Let’s start by reviewing Plato’s radical take on art and artists, from the beginning of Book X of The Republic:

Reflect:—Here are three beds; one in nature, which is made by God; another, which is made by the carpenter; and the third, by the painter. God only made one, nor could he have made more than one; for if there had been two, there would always have been a third—more absolute and abstract than either, under which they would have been included. We may therefore conceive God to be the natural maker of the bed, and in a lower sense the carpenter is also the maker; but the painter is rather the imitator of what the other two make; he has to do with a creation which is thrice removed from reality. And the tragic poet is an imitator, and, like every other imitator, is thrice removed from the king and from the truth.

Here, a duty-to-truth is proposed by Plato, and it’s a connection that many theorists have upheld for centuries. The 19th century poets were particularly fond of the association. John Keats announced, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

And Emily Dickinson’s poem is worth quoting in full:

I died for Beauty - but was scarce
Adjusted in the Tomb
When One who died for Truth, was lain
In an adjoining Room -

He questioned softly "Why I failed"?
"For Beauty", I replied -
"And I - for Truth - Themself are One -
We Brethren are", He said -

And so, as Kinsmen, met a Night —
We talked between the Rooms -
Until the Moss had reached our lips -
And covered up - Our names -

While this association was upheld through much of the 19th century, it was celebrated as a defense of poetry and the arts by those artists—Plato was not as generous. His view was that art was at a significant remove from the truth, and because of that, it tended to mislead earnest truth-seekers. Think of it like this: not only are you not your body, but you are really not a photo of your body. In his view, the images actually take us away from the original type (an interesting challenge to the icon-venerators?).

All this just to say that there is a very long and complicated discussion that must precede any discussion about whether art is valuable for its subjective influence, or as an objective standard—a discussion that inevitably drags in all of philosophy by insisting on questions like, “what is the chief end of man?” And, what is the nature of The Good itself? We may make a utilitarian defense of table- and chair-making, even as we acknowledge Plato’s point that the wooden products are not the truth themselves. But if our aim is to know and enjoy The Good, it’s not immediately clear that art is helpful. Perhaps it only creates in us false emotions, false conceptions, etc. Plato says that it’s easy to depict turbulent emotions which are not admirable, but it’s very difficult (for poets as for painters) to depict the composure and steadiness which befits a man.

Recently, critics dealing with aesthetics and literature have argued not so much about whether or not fiction can communicate knowledge (the consensus is that it can); instead, the question has been whether or not the knowledge conveyed ought to determine to some degree the artistic value of the text. In a collection of essays titled Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art (2006), Berys Gaut and Peter Lamarque represent the opposing viewpoints. Gaut's argument is that "art can nontrivially teach us and that this (partly) determines its artistic value.”. Of course, Gaut does not want to argue for didactic (preachy) art, but instead for something like pedagogic art. And it is very clear that he uses what readers learn as a standard for aesthetic evaluation (good art teaches us something; bad art does not). He calls his approach "aesthetic cognitivism," and he defends his view against the proposition that "any truth-claims advanced by fictional works cannot be confirmed by (the works themselves).'“ And Gaut does not resort to some "simulation" view that might argue that reading fiction takes the imagination "offline" and that what happens is unconscious. Instead, Gaut takes the German word verstehen (“understanding”) as his description of what the imagination does. He points us in the direction of Max Weber's work; Weber always aimed at understanding while delaying (if not indefinitely, at least temporarily) judgment. Think back to the Sensing vs. Intuition binary from the Myers-Briggs.

On the other hand, Peter Lamarque argues that "to value a work of art as a work of art is not to value it for its truth or the knowledge it imparts or its capacity to teach. In short, truth is not an artistic value" (127). But Lamarque is not defending the old "art for art's sake" proposition either. Lamarque, writing against Gaut, points out that "the question artistic cognitivists dread most is what (nontrivial) truths they have learnt from works of art" (129). And Lamarque does not deny that we can learn from fiction: "The question is not whether we can learn from fiction -- indeed it can be shown that fiction is an especially apt vehicle for certain kinds of learning... but what value to attach to this learning (?)" (133). Lamarque's is a fine distinction -- he sees the truths communicated in a given story as entirely incidental, and not a part of the story’s aesthetic value.

We’re in the weeds, aren’t we?

I used to wonder that the supposed breakthroughs in economic theory made in the late 19th century — notions like marginal utility, which supported a concept of subjective value (against Marx’s labor theory of value) — were not popular among the postmodernist-academic types. After all, when Carl Menger and his disciples like Ludwig Von Mises made the case that value was subjective, they opened a pathway to the idea that moral values should work the same way. And wasn’t this exactly what the postmodernists advocated for?

At the simplest level, the question comes off as some sort of tricky paradox or koan: if two men are walking through a temperate forest and one of them feels that he is too hot, while the other feels chilly—what can we say about the actual temperature of the air around them? Is it warm, or is it chilly? The helpful part about this kind of a question is that it is not hypothetical at all: things like this happen all the time. The famous trope about husbands and wives fighting over the thermostat shows us that different individuals can have divergent experiences in the same environment. It can only be a buffoonish character who disputes this reality—and yet, objecting to this reality is what contemporary conservatives are trying to do by rejecting the subjective element in aesthetic evaluation.

This problem exists in art when two informed viewers look at the same image and have different reactions. Thus, there is no widely held consensus about which is the best Madonna and child of all-time. The reason for that is because ultimately, our judgment depends on the standards we bring to our assessment. And nobody ever quite agrees on what the standards ought to be.

Two paintings on the Madonna and Child theme

But it’s not just comparing two paintings in the same general genre and style on the same theme that can give us headaches. We also tend to diverge over which styles themselves are the highest, most noble, and best. Many of the viewers of Monet’s “Impression, Sunrise” were completely befuddled by his effort when it was first shown in April of 1874, but millions have adored the painting in the 150 years since. The problem is more of a generic problem than a matter of evaluating a particular painting: some people just don’t like impressionism. They have their reasons. But others do, and they also have their reasons. Pretend you have a gun to your head: choose one of the two paintings below:

Caravaggio's "The Calling of Saint Matthew" (1599) and Monet's "Impression, Sunrise" (1874)

Now, imagine the same gun is pointed at your head and you have to give reasons for the choice you made.

And now, imagine you have to be completely objective. You have to build a case for one painting or the other that overcomes all matters of preference and simply is the correct answer.

The conservative who wants to defend the Caravaggio will certainly emphasize things like precision and lighting and the emotion of the scene, maybe the overall balance of the composition. But why should those criteria be what defines good art? The only answer is: preference. We have moved the goalposts a bit, but substituting one kind of preference in order to pretend that our earlier preference is not a preference, but a truth, is just a rhetorical trick.

Indeed, something like “accuracy” had long been one of the criteria for artistic excellence in painting. But in the years leading up to the rise of the impressionist movement, photography arrived on the scene. Here’s a photograph from the same period of the “actual” port of La Havre depicted in Impression, Sunrise:

Would photography make painting a defunct craft? Only if “accuracy” was the chief criterion. According to Wikipedia:

Before the 1860s and the debut of “Impression, Sunrise,” the term "impressionism" was originally used to describe the effect of a natural scene on a painter, and the effect of a painting on the viewer.

This is precisely the supposed shift that conservatives lament. The emphasis is taken away from what is depicted and it is (re-)placed on how it affects the viewer. That’s the story the conservatives tell. But was it ever really otherwise than this?

But maybe this is a straw-man, or a misrepresentation of the argument conservatives make. A friend of mine insists that art should be a striving after the sublime, after what is highest. He talks about the complexity in unity—gives the example of a tree. He talks about the skill necessary to represent that complexity in unity. He claims that modern art simplifies things and strips everything down and all of this leads to a movement away from the sublime, rather than towards it.

Of course, nobody knew all this better than the modernists. Have we forgotten Mondrian’s trees?

My sense is almost totally moving in the other direction as I look at these paintings. It’s clear that Mondrian wanted to use his skill to depict not only the complexity in unity of actual trees, but perhaps even Treeness Itself, which would be, in the Platonic sense, even more sublime, even higher, than painting an accurate tree—certainly higher than a photograph of a tree.

The first time I saw a Mondrian I was at the Saginaw Art Museum in about 1984. I was 6-years old, and I kinda liked it, probably because it reminded me of the high-contrast modernist wallpaper my very chic mom had used in our kitchen. But by the time I was a college contrarian, I was hip to the idea that modern art was bullcrap. I knew that I was supposed to roll my eyes at the abstract nonsense of the interwar period. I knew the meme: “a child could make that.” I was certainly predisposed to dislike Jackson Pollock, for example.

But one day (okay, cards on the table), I sat in my graduate school apartment and smoked half a joint for about the second time in my life with a red-headed girl named Halie. She was a libtard, and somehow we found ourselves arguing about Pollock. She insisted that I look again, look harder. “Take another hit,” she said, and open the images page on Google. This must have been 2002, so maybe it was Yahoo instead.

At first, and “all at once,” my eye took in only something like this. Just a mess, I thought. But she kept insisting. Open them up, look at them one at a time. I looked at the famous #1 painting, and disliked it. Total chaos. I looked at “Convergence,” and couldn’t make anything out. “It’s bullshit.” She kept insisting. I was stoned—why not? Finally, I saw one titled “Blue (Moby-Dick)”, and I opened it:

This was something different—not total bullshit. It was strange, yes. But so was Moby-Dick! I saw the Pequod in the top left, and a strange Ahab wearing a strange Crown of Lombardy. And I saw a giant squid, and a manta ray, and Benjamin Franklin, and a whirlpool. Hold on. This was not bullshit after all. I was just looking more closely now. I had a mini-metanoia moment. I was changing my mind. I was led to believe that Pollock just drunkenly threw paint at canvases—but here was something else, something proving he had a kind of manic and visionary talent. He wasn’t in kindergarten, he was doing his post-doc, as it were. When I saw his “Circumcision” painting, many of the same thoughts occurred to me. What do you see. Look again: what do you see? What do you feel? Why?

In Part 2 of this post (forthcoming), I’ll continue working on the question of aesthetic judgment. I’ll explore how it works with music. This is a huge topic. Just getting started. Thanks for reading!