Art criticism

« Art criticism To criticize a work of art is to make a judgment of its overall merit or demerit and to support that judgment by reference to features it possesses.

This activity is of great antiquity; we find Aristotle, for example, relating the excellence of Sophocles' Oedipus Rex to the excellence of its plot construction.

Criticism became a topic in philosophy because reflection on the kinds of things said by critics generated various perplexities and in some cases encouraged a general scepticism about the possibility of criticism.

Two general and related problems in particular have taxed philosophers.

The first is the question of whether criticism is a rational activity, that is to say, whether critics can give reasons for their judgments that would persuade potential dissenters of the rightness of those judgments.

The second, a matter to which Kant andHume made notable contributions, is the problem of the objectivity of critical judgments, it being widely believed that critical appraisals are wholly subjective or just 'a matter of taste'.

Arguments that use deductive or inductive reasoning to demonstrate the possibility of proofs of critical judgments are generally agreed to have failed.

Another approach redescribes the critic altogether, not as someone who uses argument to prove their judgments to an audience, but as someone who aims to help the audience perceive features of the work of art and understand their role in the work.

This entry will concentrate on the issues of the rationality and objectivity of art criticism.

1 A case for subjectivism Disagreements in art criticism are widespread and frequently intractable.

Subjectivists, wishing to demonstrate the impossibility of objective judgment in art, often begin with this apparently indubitable fact - though this tactic suffers from the fact that an observer is as likely to notice the widespread agreement in critical judgments over the pre-eminence of such figures asSophocles,Mozart, Tolstoy, Beethoven, Rembrandt and Shakespeare.

Nevertheless, the existence of often intense disagreement cannot be denied, but to concede this is not as yet enough to establish a subjectivist case.

For while there are vehement and intractable disagreements in, say, mathematical theory and in physics, these disagreements do not entail the subjectivity of physics or mathematics.

Apart from the fact that disagreements occur in it, there must then be some aspect of criticism that underlies the claim that it is subjective in a way that physics and mathematics are not.

It is tempting to think that while mathematics and physics possess proof or decision procedures, agreed on by practitioners of those subjects, in terms of which enquiries in those subjects proceed and disputes in them are in principle resolvable, there are no such agreed procedures in criticism. There, in lieu of argument and proofs, we have only unsupportable opinion.

The denial that criticism is a rational activity (one in which reasons can be given for judgments) becomes a principal ground for asserting that critical judgments are subjective.

2 The impossibility of induction and deduction The above section sketches the claim that there are no proof procedures in art criticism, as there are in physics and mathematics.

But what proof is offered for such a claim? One way to argue that proof procedures have no place in criticism would be to take the two most commonly accepted forms of proof - deduction and induction - and show that these cannot be invoked in support of critical judgments.

For induction, one might argue that since all pictures by Rembrandt that have been hitherto examined have been found to be great paintings, any hitherto unexaminedRembrandt is probably a great painting.

This use of induction has two weaknesses.

First, on what basis was it asserted that the first Rembrandt ever examined was a great painting? Since it was the first Rembrandt, the assertion cannot have been based on inductive proof.

Instead, an appreciator probably looked at the picture and simply pronounced that it was a great painting; here the sceptic merely repeats the question of whether that judgment can be proved by reasons. Second, the inductive judgment I have sketched has a peculiar uselessness for the would-be appreciator.

Induction might indeed lead the appreciator to conclude that an unexaminedRembrandt was probably a great one.

But the appreciator wants not merely to know indirectly that the picture is a great one: they wish to see and experience its greatness directly.

Various attempts have been made to introduce inductive procedures into criticism in order to underpin its status as a rational proof procedure.

One of the most famous uses the notion of the Golden Section. The claim is that a certain ratio is to be found in all pictures that are the subject of favourable judgments.

Hence the presence of that ratio in a picture constitutes a reason to believe that it is admirable.

The claim that any picture exhibiting the Golden Section is admirable is not a self-evident truth, since it seems possible to imagine cases in which a picture that is admirable fails to exhibit the requisite ratio, or cases in which the ratio is exhibited in a picture that is a failure.

Hence the claim must be an inductively based and probabilistic one: since admirable pictures have been found to exemplify the Golden Section, and since this picture exemplifies the Golden Section, we conclude that this picture is probably admirable.

But, again, one wishes to know how the correlation between being an admirable picture and exemplifying the Golden Section was established in the first place.

Presumably, someone asserted that a picture was admirable, then noticed that it exemplified a certain ratio and made a generalization from this.

Then, however, the original judgment that the picture is admirable is not justified by induction, but rather underpins subsequent inductive arguments.

Again, the sceptic can ask what, if anything, underpins the original judgment that the picture is admirable.

Deduction fares little better in justifying critical judgments.

In deductive argument, one offers statements in support of one's judgment, and these statements, if accepted, absolutely force the interlocutor to accept the judgment.

It is difficult to see how such a process could work with judgments of art criticism.

If I say that a painting is superb and support this statement with the assertion that its composition is admirable, its drawing excellent and its colours radiant, one of two things may happen.

First, you may agree that the composition, the drawing and the colour are as I say they are and yet not be forced to concede that the picture is superb.

You might, for instance, claim that the composition, drawing and colour, though individually excellent, do not work together.

Alternatively, you may deny that the colour, the drawing or the composition are as I say they are.

How then am I to convince you that they are? I may go on to claim that what gives the picture its compositional quality is the presence of a patch of colour in a certain position.

The problem is that, while you may agree that the patch of colour is in this position, you may not see the contribution that it makes to the composition, and thus not yet be forced to conclude that the location of the patch of colour entails the presence of the compositional quality to which I referred.

3 Generality The conclusion that neither inductive nor deductive reasoning can be used to prove, and thus justify, critical judgments may be reinforced by another, related set of considerations.

A reason has to have a generality.

If your doing a certain action in certain circumstances is a. »