one kind of specifically artistic value requires the intentional realization of an intended result, where this feat is achieved in the intended manner. It is not obvious that either Harris or Bolzano would have ruled that recourse to chance could never make a positive contribution as part of the process of artistic production. They can, however, be read as advancing the thesis that the skillful and intentional achievement of an intended result is a necessary condition on the realisation of specifically artistic value. Yet there remains the question of whether the realization of a skillful achievement is also a sufficient condition on the realization of an instance of artistic value. If that proved to be the case, then we could identify the successful application of skill as at least a first kind of essentially artistic value property, common to all of the arts.
There are, however, reasons why it could be erroneous to draw that conclusion. In this regard Aristotle is again a helpful and influential source. On one reading, his response to the question about the value of art as such is that skilled making or doing finds its actual value only in the value of what is made or done, or in other words, in the ends served by the art. For example, the various medical arts, such as radiology and surgery, serve the goals of maintaining and restoring health in various ways, which is valuable because health is necessary to our well-being or flourishing. Flourishing is not something that is sought or achieved for the sake of something else; it is intrinsically valuable, and widely and uncontroversially recognized as such. Other things are done for the sake of flourishing, and these things have actual value as a result of their contribution to flourishing’s non-instrumental or “final” value. Aristotle famously contends that if everything were done solely in order to achieve something else, in an endless series that never connected to something that is good in a non-instrumental way, all of our desires would be “fruitless and vain” (Aristotle 2004, 4, 1094a). He also appears to have held that even the most effective and skillful activities are valueless if they serve only worthless ends. If that is right, the activation of skill in an intentional, instrumentally successful action is necessary, but not sufficient to there being actual artistic value.
Aristotle could, of course, have been wrong about this. We can test the Aristotle-inspired answer to our question by asking ourselves whether we can imagine a skill the activation of which would be valuable entirely or uniquely for its own sake. The Aristotelian challenge, then, is to take an exceptional skill and eliminate all of the external payoffs, and then see what worth remains. Can there be a skill that would actually be valuable without making any contribution whatsoever to something that has final value? In answering that question, we must note that the exercise of a skill that would be a final and not an instrumental value could not have value only because it pleased some onlooker; nor could the possession of this skill be valued because the thought that one has it is itself gratifying or rewarding. These would be instrumental values, so not what Aristotle’s challenge requires. By my lights, the challenge cannot be met because the search for a skill valued exclusively for its own sake comes up empty handed. Skill is nothing more than the ability to perform some task, or range of related tasks, well. Detached from its good or bad consequences, uses, or functions, skill as such is evaluatively neutral. Skill applied to the realization of good ends is valued for the excellence of that contribution, just as skill manifested in pursuit of evil ends is hated for its deleterious effects. If we prize and admire displays of exceptional skill spontaneously and “as such,” or in other words, seemingly for their own sakes, the actual, underlying springs of value have to do with the positive, non-instrumental value of our response, as was suggested above with reference to an intrinsically enjoyable experience occasioned by a display of skill. Displays of skill, for the performers and observers alike, are generally motivated and rewarded by positive social emotions valued intrinsically by those who enjoy them. In sum, if Aristotle is right, as would seem to be the case, the chain of “in order to’s” must terminate in ends that are valued in a non-instrumental manner. Exclusively artistic value—the value of applied virtuosity or skill—is instrumental, and thus dependent on the worth of the ends it serves.
These remarks are clearly applicable to the art of motion pictures. The thought is that no amount of skillful manipulation of the diverse crafts of cinema, such as cinematography, production design, scriptwriting, montage, make-up, acting, special effects, etc., can bestow value on the filmmakers’ endeavours unless the ends pursued by the filmmakers themselves have genuine value. And arguably, to have genuine value, the artistry must ultimately be grounded in its contribution to some final value, such as human flourishing or well-being.
In Search of the Fine Arts
Given the account of art and artistic value outlined above, the evaluation of motion pictures fits within a familiar framework where skills give rise to achievements having multiple merits and demerits in relation to a variety of interests and ends, some of which have non-instrumental value. Our next question is how that framework looks when our attention shifts to a less broad category of arts, namely, those known in English, from the late 17th–century onwards, as the “fine” arts, and in a number of other languages, as “beautiful” arts: “les beaux-arts,” “die schöne Künste,” “le belle arte,” “as belas-artes,” “美禾 [mĕishù],” etc.
The fine or beautiful arts are generally thought to have a characteristic goal and corresponding species of value, in addition to the sorts of merits and demerits they share with the arts more generally and with any number of other things (Sparshott 1982). The question that has to be taken up, then, concerns the nature of the exclusive fine-artistic end and value that motivates drawing this distinction within the larger sphere of the arts.
The question of whether there is any such thing as exclusively fine-artistic value is directly relevant to the topic of the value of motion pictures. Although the various earliest moving picture technologies were rightly thought to have a variety of functions, within a few decades cinema, or at least some of its manifestations, began to be recognized as the sixth (and later as the seventh) of the fine arts (Canudo 1911). It is now quite common to distinguish between fine-art films and various moving images that clearly do not belong to that category, such as crash-dummy films and security camera footage.
As was argued above, skill or virtuosity is a characteristic artistic virtue, but as it is purely instrumental, its actual value depends on its either directly or indirectly serving ends having intrinsic value. And in the case of the fine or beautiful arts, the most characteristic value of the latter sort has often been taken to be aesthetic value (Goodhart-Rendel 1934; Sparshott 1982; Iseminger 2004). This is only informative, however, if something more can be said about what the expression “aesthetic value” is taken to refer to in such a context. The term “aesthetic,” it may be necessary to recall, was only brought into the philosophical vocabulary in the 18th century (Baumgarten 1983 [1735, 1739, 1750]). It was at that time, and remains today, both a theoretical term and a term “of art,” a contested term about which it must be asked: what is a useful and cogent way to use this term?
My proposed manner of responding to that question begins with C.I. Lewis’s observation that the term “aesthetic” should be used to identify something that most, if not all, people have good reason to care about, or in his words, “common human interests” (Lewis 1946, 373). Lewis thought it was in our common interest to be aware of those things in life that are genuinely worth pursuing, especially because “at least half of our avoidable troubles are created by those who do not know what they want and pursue what would not satisfy them if they had it” (Lewis 1946, 373). Lewis thought that a sound understanding of specifically aesthetic aims could be useful in this regard.
Lewis’ leading idea was that aesthetic value is a species of inherent value. That was the term he used to refer to an object’s capacity to occasion an intrinsically valued experience through the presentation of that object’s qualities in experience. In Lewis’s view, every experience has a positive or negative valence or felt quality, which is a mode of presentation as opposed to a second-order attitude about the intrinsic merit or demerits of the experience and its contents. In other words, someone’s experience of something could carry a positive or negative immediate valence for that person in the absence of an occurrent belief having the content: this is an intrinsically valuable experience.