Artistic Merit

This paper seeks to refute the view that judgments of artistic value improperly aspire to intersubjective validity, which is to say that they can only be true or false for a particular person (or others relevantly like him), that they cannot be straightforwardly true or false. It aims to do this by showing that the principal considerations that have led to the acceptance of this view--the imprecision of the metric of artistic value and the existence of widespread and apparently unresolvable disagreements in artistic evaluation--fail to give it any support and that there are no other plausible considerations. This is achieved by distinguishing the individual relativity that is supposed (wrongly) to obtain for artistic evaluations from other forms of relativity for which artistic evaluations can properly be relative (none of these other forms implying individual relativity); by distinguishing between artistic evaluations and artistic preferences; and by identifying the value specific to art (the value of a work of art qua work of art) and, thus, the character of the properties of a work that can properly be cited as reasons in support of an artistic evaluation. The conclusion is that the claim to intersubjectivity that is built into a judgment of artistic value is in no way misplaced or suspect.