Hutter, Michael, and David Throsby. Beyond Price: Value in Culture, Economics, and the Arts. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
Page 41, essay by Richard Shusterman
“We often speak of the entertainment value of novels, plays, music, and other works of art. But cultural critics just as often contrast art to entertainment, viewing the former as culturally far superior in value. Is entertainment value an important part of art’s value or merely a subordinate, inessential means to conveying that value? Is it perhaps even an unwanted distraction from true artistic value?...Although the precise nature of aesthetic value is unclear and hotly contested, it is generally conceived as an intrinsic rather than an instrumental value. Entertainment, however, seems to imply instrumentality – a means of distracting, amusing, or refreshing oneself, or a way of enjoyably passing one’s time. So besides examining the concept of entertainment, I will also analyze the crucial but problematic notion of intrinsic value. This analysis will enable me to argue that intrinsic value can be reasonably construed in a way that allows a contextual contrast with instrumental value without presuming a radical dichotomy between them that would deny intrinsic value to things that clearly have instrumental value. Being instrumentally effective would not then automatically preclude entertainment value from being also an intrinsic value of art and aesthetic experience and would allow it to be considered a possible constituent of aesthetic value.
One prominent aspect of aesthetic value is its experiential quality. Such value does not lend itself to quantitative calculation or discursive proof but is realized or made evident in direct experience. It is in the experience of an appreciating subject that this value comes to life and is demonstrated; that is why aesthetic value is often described as being subjective in some sense, even when it is argued that such judgments also exhibit some objectivity of consensus and criteria of evaluation. In this sense of experiential value, it does not really make sense to speak of appreciating the aesthetic value of an artwork by merely having read or heard about it but without ever having experienced it, either in its original form or in an adequate reproducing. In the same way, entertainment value needs to be appreciated in direct and personal experience of the artwork enjoyed.
There are also other values that play an important role in evaluation of art, especially whenever we go beyond the specific aesthetic domain to consider the wider field of culture. We sometimes praise (or condemn) an artwork in terms of its social value – its effects in promoting social harmony or social progress. We also speak of the political value of art in similar terms. In the debates over the value of popular art, for example, there are arguments affirming its social and political value in terms of democratic expression, just as there are vehement allegations of its noxious social and political effects in terms of lowering of cultural standards and promotion of an unthinkingly conformist, mass mentality (Shusterman 1992, Ch. 7). Moreover, there are economic valuations of art that relate to sales and profit figures, and those that relate to issues of symbolic capital and status that are more difficult to quantify. To understand or appreciate such values it does not seem necessary to base one’s evaluation on vivid, direct experience of the artwork itself; one can instead concentrate on the work’s effects and relationships in the social, political, or economic fields in which it is situated.
These dimensions of valuing art most aestheticians regard as clearly extrinsic to genuine aesthetic value. But there are two other ways of valuing art that seem closer to the core notion of intrinsic aesthetic value but can still be distinguished form it: art-historical value and artistic value. The first relates to the contribution an artwork or genre has made to art history and cultural history. An artwork that no longer provides rewarding aesthetic experience to many people can still be widely hailed as artistically valuable because it earlier achieved classic status and thus forms an integral, inseparable part of an influential tradition that we still greatly value. The now unappealing classic thus remains highly valued for the still appealing tradition of works that it helped inspire. This value seems clearly relational – a function of the work’s place of role with respect to other works…
To have artistic, as distinguished from art-historical, value, an artwork need not be historically influential; it could simply demonstrate valuable qualities of technique in a given artistic genre. This sense of value hearkens back to the old general meaning of art as a specific skill or craft. A work might be aesthetically disappointing and fail to produce rewarding experience but still have the redeeming value of demonstrating some technical skill in the artistic medium. It is at least artistically valuable to that extent. One can imagine an aesthetically dismal portrait that nonetheless showed technical skill in drawing, or a note-perfect but unexpressive and uninspiring performance of a difficult musical work. If the technical skill demonstrated is innovative or impressive enough to be influential, then such artistic value could also constitute art-historical value. But even if we cannot speak of influence, artistic value seems clearly relational, since excellence of skill or technique make at least implicit reference to standards or paradigms of excellence that lie beyond the artwork itself. This, however, does not entail that artistic value is extrinsic rather than intrinsic, since the value is nonetheless embodied or expressed in the work itself rather than merely its external effects. As with aesthetic value, the proper appreciation of artistic value seems to require a direct experience of the work, though being told that a difficult musical performance was “note-perfect” may perhaps be enough for us to accord it some degree of artistic value without having heard it. Because of this common experiential anchorage (if not also for other reasons), artistic value and aesthetic value are more often run together than distinguished. “
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