high artistic merit requires exceptional skill in the realization of highly worthwhile ends, and where even a skillful and highly creative realization of bad ends is worthless. One of the sorts of value that may be identified in a work is a specifically aesthetic kind of merit—understood here as the work’s capacity, when contemplated appropriately, to occasion intrinsically valenced experiences not based on possessive or moral attitudes. Not all aesthetic merit is artistic merit, even in the broad sense of “artistic.” Given a less broad concept of art, namely, the aesthetic-value centered notion of fine art evoked in Section 3, specifically fine-artistic merit is a kind of power to occasion aesthetic experiences, and in particular, those based on the admiration of the artist’s skillful realization of worthwhile tasks. When skill is applied to the realization of worthwhile ends, along with the realization of a work’s primary, aesthetic goal, our overall admiration of a work of fine art as such may be grounded in a convergence of distinct kinds of value, such as aesthetic, epistemic, and moral value. What happens when distinct kinds of value-related qualities do not converge is the topic of the next section.
On the Relations between Diverse Values in a Work
Much has been written on this difficult topic, and I shall not survey that literature here (for a start, see Song 2018). My approach will be to introduce a few conceptual points on this topic with reference to a schematic, imaginary example, the stipulated features of which are not subject to empirical dispute.
Imagine, then, a case where a spectator realizes that a particular cinematographic device has been employed in a film, and this in a way that is “fresh” or pleasantly innovative. Imagine, then, that this is a positively valenced property having “aesthetic” merit in the sense articulated above; imagine as well that it is also a fine-artistic merit because the viewer’s pleasure is based partly on an admiration of the filmmakers’ skillful employment of the medium. Let us suppose as well that the same cinematic work manifests many other particular attributes, such as moral and epistemic merits and demerits directly related to the manner in which the film’s historical subject matter is depicted. For example, the various complex elements of the film’s production design achieve a high level of historical verisimilitude, as is fitting to the genre and story. Even spectators having considerable expertise regarding the historical context in question find these aspects of the film remarkable and praiseworthy. Yet, suppose as well that these same spectators rightly find other features of the work highly criticizable. Important aspects of the characterizations lack verisimilitude. Moreover, other features of the story and characterization are objectionable because they were patently designed to elicit admiration for what our spectators identify as reprehensible behavior and attitudes. As a result of these divergent qualities and the conflicting responses they occasion, the tension between positively valenced aesthetic merits and negatively valenced moral and epistemic flaws becomes central to the appreciator’s experience of the film. The properties and relations in the work that ground this tension may be counted as an aesthetic and fine-artistic shortcoming, on the assumption that coherence, or unity in diversity, is a relevant desideratum.
In such a case, in assessing the film, competent appreciators may be capable of distinguishing clearly between many of the determinate valenced qualities they have experienced in attending to the work: such-and-such qualities were aesthetically pleasing and artistically meritorious; such-and-such qualities had epistemic or pedagogical value; others still were ethically dubious or objectionable. There is, however, no way to arrive at a simple summation of these disparate valences. One cannot, for example, assign a score of -x units of value to the film’s dubious moral content and a score of + y units of value to its aesthetic qualities, and so on, so that when added up, these units of value would jointly be indicative of the overall merit of the work as a whole. And yet a report and verdict regarding the work’s overall merit is what the appreciator is often expected to provide. One is asked for an overall recommendation (or condemnation) of the film; in some institutional contexts, the work is to be ranked in relation to other works and awarded or denied some prize or other distinction.
One solution to this problem is to reject such demands and expectations on the grounds that the plurality of valenced properties in the work is irreducible. Given that fact, the best an evaluator can do is to enumerate the diverse features of the work, which in some cases turns out to be a matter of describing a striking contrast between merits and demerits of various sorts. Another approach is to settle on some manner of assigning relative priorities to the different values attributed to the film. This often involves granting a kind of “lexical” priority to one kind of value, or it may be a matter of erecting some more elaborate ordering or hierarchy of types of value. For example, it is assumed that unless some threshold of ethical (or hedonic, or epistemic, or other) merit has been crossed, a work cannot be positively recommended as a whole. In such a case there is still no mathematical summation of the work’s varied and conflicting valences, but there is an overall verdict based on the axiological priorities the appreciator brings to the making of an evaluative assessment of the work as a whole. It should be noted, however, that even if this general solution to the problem is endorsed, there may still be problems arising from its application to particular cases. Evaluators may diverge with regard to where the value threshold should lie. It is one thing, for example, to hold that grievous moral flaws disqualify a work taken as a whole, in spite of whatever artistic or other merits might be spotted along the way; it is something else again to require that a high degree of moral merit must have been attained if other kinds of merit are to be recognized within an overall assessment of the work. Those who advocate the latter sort of strong moralism clearly have a greater argumentative burden to shoulder.1
Note
1 1 I thank Mette Hjort and Ted Nannicelli for the invitation to take up this topic for the purposes of their collection, and for helpful editorial comments on a draft of the chapter.
References
1 Angier, Tom. 2010. Technē in Aristotle’s Ethics: Crafting the Moral Life. London: Continuum.
2 Aristotle. 1984a. “Nicomachean Ethics.” In The Complete Works of Aristotle, translated by W. D. Ross and edited by Jonathan Barnes. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
3 _____. 1984b. “Metaphysics.” In The Complete Works of Aristotle, translated by W. D. Ross and edited by Jonathan Barnes. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
4 _____. 2004. Nicomachean Ethics, translated and edited by Roger Crisp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
5 Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb. 1983. Texte zur Grundlegung der Aesthetik, translated and edited by Hans Rudolf Schweizer. Hamburg: Felix Meiner.
6 Bolzano, Bernard. 1849. Über die Eintheilung der schönen Künste. Eine ästhetische Abhandlung. Prague: Gottlib Haase.
7 Bordwell, David. 2019. “The Spectacle of Skill: BUSTER SCRUGGS as Master Class.” Observations on Film Art (blog), David Bordwell’s website on cinema. January 13, 2019. http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2019/01/13/the-spectacle-of-skill-buster-scruggs-as-master-class.
8 Canudo, Ricciotto. 1911. “La naissance d’un sixième art: Essai sur le cinématographe.” Les entretiens idéalistes 10 (6): 169–79.
9 Dio Chrysostom. 1951. Discourses, translated by Henry Lamar Crosby. London: William Heinemann.
10 Du Bos, l’Abbé Jean-Baptiste. 1733. Réflexions critiques sur la poësie et sur la peinture, 2nd ed. rev., 3 vols. Paris: Pierre-Jean Mariette.
11 Feagin, Susan. 1994. “Valuing the Artworld.” In Institutions of Art: Reconsiderations of George Dickie’s Philosophy, edited by Robert
