Quality in the arts

[Belacqua]

There IS a quantifiable scale of a what of a work of art is worth.


How much will you pay?

Here is a good example of how, in my view, aesthetic issues are like ethical ones. 

If all ethical issues were determined by financial standards, things would be simpler. But I don't think any of us here would find this to be a good system. 

It's important for us to think about values that don't depend on money, especially since our culture is so deeply money-oriented. 

Get snobby and pitch a hissy fit all you like, it doesn't change the fact that great works of art bring great amounts of money.

It's true that great works go for high prices. I'm not against that, especially if some of them end up in museums. (Tax policy can encourage this.) 

The complication is that some works which aren't great also go for huge amounts of money. And part of what I want to do here is think about standards by which we can say, "that was expensive, but it's also bad." 

Not to get all Marxist on you, but there is a difference between the intrinsic value of an object (use-value, if we're talking about non-art-objects) and exchange value (what it goes for in the market). In modern capitalism these things are often wildly unrelated. 

To complain that artists rarely get rich, and should be subsdidfized by the government totally missed the point of great art.

I don't mind if artists get rich. Whether the government should subsidize them is a separate issue -- I'm not really sure. 

Great art comes about when the artist does what he does for the sake of the art and not for a paycheck.

This is probably true. Motivations other than financial are certainly necessary. 

But again, the artist's private motivation isn't something that's intrinsic in the artwork, by which we can say if it's good or not. I'm wanting to talk about aesthetic quality.

That story of the artists suffering is what makes a work of art worth more than an identical forgery - which was done strictly for the money

This gets tricky. A fake may have artistic quality, in that it possesses the same qualities as its original. 

Here we get in to a grey area: to what extent the aesthetic quality of the work is derived from facts not in the work itself. For example, provenance adds exchange value. If a teacup was used by a Chinese emperor, the exchange value goes way up, even if it's not such a beautiful cup. I have sympathy for this, as all artworks have an "aura" which is part of the experience. 

The fact that van Gogh really did paint a work, really did suffer over it, really did give it to his friend, etc., lends the object itself some emotional quality. A fake doesn't have that. But a good fake may be as good-looking as a bad van Gogh. I'm not sure about all this. 

(There was a Japanese potter who was told that a guy down the hill from him was faking his works. He was happy about this, as he said that in the future when they were both dead, all of his bad pots would be attributed to the faker, and all the faker's good pots would be attributed to him.) 

When art is subsidized, usually by government - you end up with second or third rate shit. The IKEA of art. Stuff that looks like, but isn't quite art.

Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Largely it depends on the government. When Florence was governed by the Medici, it got some great stuff. 

If our current government is commissioning bad stuff, I blame both the politicians and the artists. And I think our current tendency to think "It's all subjective" may be partly to blame here.