on non-aesthetic intentions. For example, if a motion picture was made and designed primarily with the intention of getting some political or ethical message across to a target audience, it is not a work of fine art. It could be cleverly designed and have significant aesthetic value (in the Lewisian sense at least), but that does not make it a work of fine art. It is, of course, a work of art in the broad sense of “art” discussed in Section 1, and for many purposes, that is good enough.
Given the intentional conditions in the proposed explication of “fine art,” and the existence of cases where we happen to lack evidence about the maker(s)’ intentions, there will be cases where we do not know whether it is correct to classify a given work as a work of fine art. In such cases, it is possible to appreciate a work “as if” it belonged to the category of fine art and experience its merits and demerits relative to that kind of art.
On Fine Art’s Value Qua Fine Art
Many natural and other items, such as landscapes and cityscapes, can have aesthetic inherent value in the sense outlined above. It follows that this sort of value is not exclusive to the fine arts. This conclusion is happily consistent with the prevalent assumption that there is a difference between artistic and aesthetic value. “Aesthetic” and “artistic” are not synonyms, even in a context where what is meant by the latter is “fine-artistic.” So, in turning to aesthetic merit in the previous section, we may seem to have failed to locate any exclusively fine-artistic sort of value, which is what we were after.
Yet that is not right, because one aspect of fine art’s aesthetic value is exclusively artistic. That is the case because the manifestation of skill in a performance or work can give rise to admiration, the experience of which normally has an intrinsic valence for the admirer. To mention an obvious example, someone who has made a clever or well-wrought film that is very intriguing or pleasurable to watch may be admired by that film’s spectators, who enjoy not only the relevant qualities of the audio-visual display, but their own feelings of admiration for the filmmaker’s artistry in making it. In such a case the artist’s manifestation of skill has a specific kind of artistry-based aesthetic inherent value. The natural environment’s many pleasing aesthetic qualities do not have this same kind of artistry-based aesthetic value, unless one attributes these qualities to the design of some actual maker, or holds, erroneously in my view, that the entire idea of natural aesthetic qualities is parasitic on looking at nature as if it were a humanly created work of art (on this point I follow Sibley 2001).
According to this proposal, then, fine-artistic value is a species of aesthetic value. Like all aesthetic value, it is a Lewisian inherent value (and thus an instrumental value) because it is a capacity to occasion intrinsically valenced experiences. In the case of positive fine-artistic value, that power amounts to the ability to exhibit what l’Abbé Du Bos called “the merits of execution” (Du Bos 1733, vol. 1, 67). If Aristotle is right, displays of exceptional instrumental efficacy or virtuosity only find their real value in their direct or indirect contribution to some kind of final value. It follows, then, that we cannot justifiably admire the artist’s skill uniquely for its own sake, since virtuosity as such has no intrinsic merit. It may seem to us that we could justifiably admire the artist’s skill simply because it has its own independent or final value. Yet in fact a display of skill can have instrumental value because we admire it, but we cannot justifiably admire it for purely fine-artistic reasons alone. This reasoning is not a matter of denying that there are actual differences of ability or skill. What is denied is that such differences are decisive with regard to the actual merit of the action. We cannot justifiably admire a work of art simply because it has been made with skill. We can, however, admire an exceptionally skilful performance or work for various other reasons, such as the value we attach to what can be learnt from the work, the relief from boredom it provides, or because some other positive, final value crops up in an assessment of the work’s merits.
With regard to the value of virtuosity, Ted Nannicelli (personal communication) asks whether some film critics and spectators do not actually prize cinematic virtuosity as a final value, or as something that is valuable for its own sake, and not valuable only by virtue of the worthwhile experiences it makes possible, or by virtue of some other payoffs or consequences. After all, it sounds strange to say that virtuosity is valuable because we admire it, and not that we admire it because it is intrinsically valuable. My contention is not that the latter view is psychologically impossible (there are, after all, the yearly Guinness World Records volumes documenting and honoring pointless but highly difficult and novel “accomplishments”). Nor is it my claim that no film critics have endorsed cinematic virtuosity “for its own sake.” What I do claim, however, is that such an evaluative stance cannot be based on adequate reasons of the right kind. Here we return to the Aristotelian challenge that was broached earlier in this chapter. If a critic or spectator effectively holds that the ends served by the filmmaker’s skill were not worthwhile, and that the talent manifested in the filmmaker’s performance was not admirable or in any other way gratifying to behold, what could be the basis for an evaluative verdict regarding that skill’s putative non-instrumental merit? What reason could one have to attribute intrinsic or final value to an ability that did not contribute to some worthwhile action? Whenever we give reasons to justify prizing a demonstration of skill, these reasons involve instrumental payoffs or consequences and not simply the overcoming of difficulties for its own sake—which is inconsistent with the contention that the item’s value is non-instrumental.
Consider in this regard David Bordwell’s laudatory description of what he justifiably takes to be the authorial virtuosity exhibited in the Coen brothers’ (2018) film, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, a quirky, grim, and darkly comedic western. With characteristic precision, Bordwell limns some of the many ways in which this film’s mise en scène and montage manifest exceptional virtuosity. The film is replete with audacious, clever, surprising, and amusing camera angles and cuts, such as a shot that would appear to have been taken, rather absurdly, from inside the sound hole of a guitar being strummed by a cowboy singing on horseback. Bordwell’s remarks on the film focus almost entirely on its ingenious cinematic devices. One might consequently be led to think that his assumption is that cinematic virtuosity—the cleverness and novelty of artistic means, especially those exclusive to the cinematic medium or art form—is a final value, or something that is “good for its own sake.” Yet such is not the actual nature of Bordwell’s evaluative scheme, at least as I understand it. In this regard it is significant that he begins his piece on this film with the declaration that “Craft isn’t everything in art, but it is a lot.” If craft is not everything in a work of art, then there has to be something else. And what is that? Bordwell’s first assumption on this score is perhaps that the uptake of the work’s clever artistry is cognitively stimulating and pleasant. In other words, craft’s value is linked to the work’s power to occasion intrinsically valued experiences. A second assumption is that a pessimistic or bleak world view is a legitimate subject of artistic expression, and that the exceptional craft of the film is partly a matter of excellence (vividness, acuity, “artisanal precision”) of expression, another source of value. Still another relevant assumption is that the film is praiseworthy partly because it can serve as a rare and useful example for other filmmakers with regard to the art of efficient and worthwhile cinematic storytelling. Bordwell’s related claim about the film’s function as a “master class” thereby implies the instrumental merit of the film’s “quiet virtuosity of craft.” Bringing these points together, we can say that this expert critic does not value the film simply because craft or virtuosity is a final, self-sufficient value, or because the display of virtuosity stirs up admiration in him for no reason whatsoever. Instead, his independent appraisal of the multiple merits of the filmmakers’ project allow him to admire and recommend the exceptionally ingenious artistry that has been marshalled in its service.
To summarize these considerations, a broad assessment of a multi-faceted work of art will normally turn up a plurality of values, amongst which are those that are exclusively artistic. Yet the expression “exclusively artistic” is ambiguous. Given the broad conception of art set forth in Section 1, artistic
