If an art is a capacity or a skill, its value is realized when that skill is applied in some action. Sometimes this results in the production of an artifact having a range of valued functions serving a plurality of ends. The value of an art is generally equated with the value of the performances or artifacts it yields, which in many cases are referred to as “works” (but in other cases as “products,” “performances,” “displays,” “operations,” etc.). For example, various arts of motion pictures and other technologies must be employed to produce a device (for example, a DVD or a digital file) that can be used to generate multiple instances of a type of audio-visual display. The value of the art of motion pictures resides primarily, but not exclusively in the uses to which such displays are put. I write “primarily, but not exclusively” because value and “disvalue” may also inhere in the processes or actions involved in the genesis of an audio-visual display. Value and disvalue also pertain to various aspects of cinema understood, not only as a collection of audio-visual displays or cinematic works, but also as a complex constellation of social institutions, activities, and events On the topic of the values of the artworld as a systemic whole, see (Feagin 1994), who conjectures that even works that taken individually may not seem to fulfill certain functions may contribute to the larger system’s fulfillment of those very functions.
When one asks about the value of a work of art, several distinct questions come to mind. It is one thing to ask what kinds of value a particular work, such as a given motion picture, has. It is something else to enquire into the exclusively artistic value that some work may have. I will first say a few things about the former question and then turn to the latter.
In answering the broad question about the values of a particular work or performance, one normally discovers that the work has many different kinds of value, such as financial, sentimental, expressive, therapeutic, hedonic, moral, political, religious, epistemic, and pedagogical values. Striking contrasts and tensions may emerge: an action or product that is very bad in relation to one kind of value may turn out to be highly valuable in other ways, including ones the artisan(s) neither intended nor anticipated. A very poorly made film may have great pedagogical value because it can be used to illustrate grave errors that filmmakers should avoid. If the mistakes are laughable, the film may also prove to be entertaining by virtue of its flaws, a fact which bestows yet another sort of value on the work. A film may have the virtue of being an authentic and skillful expression of the filmmaker’s pessimistic world view. It could by the same stroke be well suited to help others learn about such a perspective on life. Yet it could be depressing for some viewers, and for others, it could serve to encourage suicidal inclinations (as in the “Werther effect” investigated by sociologists). The wasteful way in which a film was made could have a negative impact on the environment. Some of the performers may be harmed during the shooting of the film, whereas others profit immensely from the experience, and so on. In many cases, it may be very hard, or even impossible, to find a single overarching value or norm in relation to which a work’s plurality of valences could be compared and summed up (for background on axiological pluralism vs. monism, see Stocker 1990; Heathwood 2015). I return to this topic at the end of the chapter.
I move on now to the question of exclusively artistic value, which asks whether there is some kind of value that is shared by all arts in their common capacity as or qua arts. Given the extremely broad conception of art introduced above, this question may be formulated as follows: what is the exclusive value of skilled making or doing as such? Armed with an answer to that question, one could focus on whether and how this essential artistic value is manifested in specific artistic performances or works. One could then ask about the relations, within a particular work, between its exclusively artistic merit(s) and demerits, and its other, non-artistic merits and demerits. Such relations are hard to identify in the absence of a sufficiently precise identification of the relata—a problem that plagues the literature on the relations between diverse values within a particular work or performance.
With the question of the value of qua art in mind, consider first a few historical sources. For a start, here is Dio Chrysostom’s (1st century CE) anecdote regarding the legendary Greek artist, Apelles:
So, then, Apelles knew not how to represent froth of a horse wearied in action. But as he was more and more perplexed, finally in a fit of desperation he hurled his sponge at the painting, striking it near the bit. But the sponge, containing as it did many colours, which when taken together resembled bloody froth, fitted its colour to the painting. And at the sight Apelles was delighted by what Fortune [Tyche] had accomplished in his moment of despair and finished his painting, not through his art, but through the aid of Fortune. (Dio Chrysostom 1951, 39, vol. 5, ch. 63:4; my italics)
This anecdote was also related by Sextus Empiricus (1st–2nd century CE) in his Outlines of Pyrrhonism:
They say he was painting a horse and wanted to represent in his picture the lather on the horse’s mouth; but he was so unsuccessful that he gave up, took the sponge on which he had been wiping off the colours from his brush, and flung it at the picture. And when it hit the picture, it produced a representation. of the horse’s lather. (Sextus Empiricus 2000, 10–11)
In both versions of the story, the purely fortuitous realization of a desired mimetic effect is contrasted to an attempted manifestation of artistic virtuosity. Whereas Apelles is said to have been delighted with the lucky outcome, he could hardly pride himself on having met the artistic challenge he had taken up. The lucky effect had some kind of value for the artist, but it lacked another kind of value, namely, the value that a successful artistic feat would have had.
Pliny the Elder (1st century CE) relates a similar story in which the frustrated but lucky artist is named “Protogenes.” Pliny adds another character to the story:
Finally he [Protogenes] fell into a rage with his art because it was perceptible, and dashed a sponge against the place in the picture that offended him, and the sponge restored the colours he had removed, in a way that his anxiety had wished them to appear, and chance produced the effect of nature in the picture!
It is said that Nealces also following this example of his achieved a similar success in representing a horse’s foam by dashing a sponge on the picture in a similar manner, in a representation of a man clucking in his cheek to soothe a horse he was holding. Thus, did Protogenes indicate the possibilities of a stroke of luck also. (Pliny the Elder 1951, 338–339)
It is hard to know how to read Pliny’s remark regarding Nealces’ achievement. Imitating Protogenes’ lucky stroke by intentionally throwing the sponge at an incomplete picture is quite different from spontaneously casting the sponge in frustration. Nealces has not gotten as far as Jackson Pollock, but there is still an element of skill in his attempt at artistically beneficial sponge casting—an element that was lacking in Protogenes’ gesture.
This locus classicus was revisited by James Harris in the essay on art in his Three Treatises:
You have heard, said he, without doubt, of that Painter famed in Story, who being to paint the Foam of a Horse, and not succeeding to his Mind, threw at the Picture in Resentment a Sponge bedaubed with Colours, and produced a Foam the most natural imaginable. Now, what say you to this Fact? Shall we pronounce Art to have been the Cause? (Harris 1744, 6–7)
Harris responds to his rhetorical question in the negative. Art, he contends, requires not only a causal relation, but “intention, reason, volition, and consciousness” (Harris 1744, 7); the definition of “art” that he wishes to defend is “an habitual power in man of becoming the cause of some effect, according to a system of various and well-approved precepts” (Harris 1774, 17).
The “Painter famed in Story” was later alluded to by Bernard Bolzano in his elucidation of a concept of fine art in Über die Eintheilung der Schönen Künste [On the classification of the
