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Tuesday, September 1, 2020

On the Intrusion of Non-aesthetic Criteria in Value Judgements about Art




For thousands of years most people have believed a proposition that seems to me absurd on its face: the idea that art should inculcate good behavior, that good literature teaches morality, often accompanied by the fear that exposure to bad art can encourage unethical actions. This belief is widespread in spite of the fact that artists have no greater access to truth than others and lack even training in philosophy or religion. Few, I think, would suspect that poets, painters, or professors of literature have any more orderly lives than philistines, yet the idea of the value of art as moral instruction has persisted through the centuries. The fact is that poets are distinguished by their ability to manipulate words, visual artists for their facility with form, composers with patterns of sound, and for nothing else at all. Creativity has no correlation with morality.

It is no surprise that such non-aesthetic criteria are advanced by governments and churches, institutions that know nothing of beauty, but they also appear in critics who should know better. In fact the theoretical association between art and ethics descends from archaic times. Oral cultures transmit their myths and mores through song, drama, sculpture, and story which often embody largely unquestioned “truths” about prudential or god-pleasing behavior. Poetry for such people is the most effective coding of all sorts of knowledge including moral judgements and political theory. Early writers saw teaching people how to behave as one of their most important functions. Plato’s doubts about the moral reliability of poetry led him to advocate censorship (he was blind to the similar unreliability of philosophy). The didactic role of literature was eventually enshrined in a dictum so influential it has been called “the Horatian platitude”: poetry should “teach and delight.” [1] This notion was then maintained by Augustine’s tempered acceptance of poetry as a possible aid toward salvation. Sidney continued the notion that poets work “to delight and teach, and delight to move men to take that goodness in hand, which without delight they would fly as from a stranger; and teach to make them know that goodness whereunto they are moved.” Shelley, too, thought “the greatest poets have been men of the most spotless virtue” (though some of his contemporaries would have been skeptical of his right to that description).

This assumption persisted until the age of Romanticism when an exalted view of imagination allowed beauty to displace truth altogether in the old formula. Strengthened by the proponents of “art for art’s sake” in the late Victorian era, by the mid-twentieth century, one of the most prominent critics could flatly declare “Art is neither good nor bad, but a clairvoyant vision of the nature of both, and any attempt to align it with morality is intolerably vulgar.” Many critics would now agree that “Our very idea of art precludes adherence” to the association of poetry with morality. [2] Yet a considerable revanchment has occurred as well, primarily associated with feminism and soi-disant progressivism and associated with the critical schools labeled new historicism, cultural criticism, gender studies, and the like which too often fired with self-righteous indignation employ the crudest instruments of Marxism to reduce art to mere social data. In practice the moral responsibility of art has been extended to the maker as well. An immoral poet has been thought to produce necessarily unworthy work, while, by the same erroneous principle, the virtues of an upright writer may seem to enhance the value of what he writes. The entire framework is repeated in the realm of social, not personal, morality, which is to say politics. An ethically motivated critics would find a defender of slavery, say, sinful and therefore capable of producing only flawed poetry, while a progressive or revolutionary writer is likely to be celebrated.

These days we hear little about people being led astray by licentious literature, but this was the cry of philistines and bluenoses for centuries. Socrates, after all, was executed for corrupting the youth. Those who closed the theaters (not just in the U. K. in 1642, and in the United States at the time of its birth in 1774 and 1778) regularly maintained that attending plays fosters licentious behavior. In recent American culture the same impulse is evident in censorship of Joyce, Henry Miller [3], and Allen Ginsberg.

Sometimes the political and personal are so mingled they can hardly be separated. When NEA and NEH funding was drastically cut in the nineties, the assault was led by Jesse Helms, whose political career was founded in racist bigotry. One of the chief targets of the philistines was Andre Serrano’s “Piss Christ.” It became perhaps the most popular objet d’art among evangelical Christians in modern times -- reproductions of it appeared in right-wing Christian publications for years afterwards. Needless to say, Mr. Helms had probably not set foot in a gallery or museum in his entire adult life, and the same may be safely assumed of the outraged Christians. The very same silly drama was reenacted around Chris Ofili’s “The Holy Virgin Mary” made in part of elephant dung, but also, since one must always up the ante, with cutouts of pudenda from pornographic materials. (Such controversy has always been good for business. Ofili’s “Mary” resold in 2015 for just short of three million pounds.)

More recently, in a development disturbing to progressive aesthetes, those claiming to oppose racism and other oppression have turned against the easier opponent of art. Thus would-be critics in a popular and influential critical edition of Jane Austen’s Emma criticize the author for her “failure to envisage a female community across social barriers.” and for her refusal to admit that “impoverished middle-class women are victims of a capitalist system.” [4] Only a singularly obtuse reader would use such irrelevant and anachronistic language to speak of the novel.

Rulers wreak more havoc than obtuse critics, though, when they conflate of art and morality. Apart from its centrality in literary theory until recent times this confusion in its political form has, not surprisingly, been an assumption of authoritarian regimes of all sorts. The very same erroneous standards appeared in the hunt for heretics by the medieval and Renaissance Catholic Church, Nazi condemnation of “degenerate” and Jewish art, the Stalinist imposition of a radically reductive “socialist realism” in 1932, and fundamentalist Islam’s disapproval of images and music. Each of these represents an attempt by the rulers to restrict art to a simple-minded statement of the most basic socially approved values. Such misguided and reductive judgements take place in somewhat democratic societies as well. Last year San Francisco was asked to remove the WPA murals by Communist painter Victor Arnautoff in George Washington High School with the excuse that they should be replaced by “more positive” images. These pictures were targeted specifically because they did include representation of the genocidal attacks of native people and the viciousness of slavery.

All such critics cannot be condemned as know-nothing yahoos. The sensitive have questioned the stature of authors with fascist sympathies, such as Louis-Ferdinand CĂ©line or Ezra Pound. Thoughtful people have expressed reservations about appreciating the films of Roman Polanski and Woody Allen, not because of any shortcomings in the work itself, but rather what they view as unpardonable acts by the artists.

Should the work of a poet or painter lose stature because its creator beats his wife? No more than one would refuse the attendance of a celebrated surgeon if one found he supported Generalissimo Trump. Clearly a person may excel in one arena of life, in a profession, for example, while misbehaving badly in others. Skill does not excuse a vicious person, but neither does the creator’s immoral behavior invalidate or weaken the work.

Of course, ethics and politics have an important role to play in making human life livable, even sometimes civilized. I by no means discount the importance of morality in evaluating societies and individual character, but these have nothing to do with aesthetic value. Government and non-profit agencies may naturally make social betterment a goal, but they should not then pretend that their decisions are determined by artistic considerations. Without exception, every one of the most recent recipients of NEA grants, announced in January of 2020, was associated with a social group identified as oppressed or underserved. [5] Just as in higher education admissions and hiring, diversity is a worthy goal which might be well-served by affirmative action, but academic or artistic strength must remain the primary criterion for judgement.

In evaluating art, politics and morality are irrelevant, popularity should play no role, nor should historical influence. An author’s colorful notoriety or exemplary propriety should never lead the reader either toward or away from his work. Each poem, song, or picture must earn attention through its beauty, broadly understood as reflecting elements of both form and content. Questions of ethics are most assuredly central to our shared humanity, and there are better and worse systems of government and virtuous and vicious forms of behavior, but that is because our political and social practices impact on our well-being. In general, an immoral person is one who causes suffering to others while a moral one displays benevolence. An exploitative social system likewise increases human pain and a more just one relieves it. These effects are evident in lived experience. In contrast, the effects of art occur in the consciousness of the consumer and the unique reward art may offer is beauty, a quality which would be wholly amoral were it not that some acts are attractive and some repellent. A few words in the air, a curving line, a succession of musical tones, how could these be morally good or bad? A work of art can do no more than to offer amusement and distraction and glimpses of beauty. If a work fails, we will not be so harsh as to call tiresomeness a sin.



1. The Epistula ad Pisonem (or Ars Poetica) repeats the idea in several forms: "Aut prodesse uolunt aut delectare poetae aut simul et iucunda et idonea dicere uitae" (The poet aims to benefit or delight, or to be both pleasing and serviceable in life at once), "miscuit utile dulci" (a mix of useful and sweet), and "delectando pariterque monendo" (delighting and warning).

2. The first quotation is from Fearful Symmetry A Study of William Blake (p. 121) and the next from Tzvetan Todorov and John Anzalone, “Poetry and Morality,” Salmagundi, No. 111 (Summer 1996).

3. Tropic of Cancer was not legally published in the United States until 1964.

4. See the devastating and detailed critique in James Seaton’s Literary Criticism from Plato to Postmodernism: the Humanistic Alternative, p. 63-4. 5. The list consisted of awards for black universities, for Alaskan native dance, for fashion design for the disabled, for teaching girls metalworking, in support of an opera festival by women composers, for “Latinx” events, for youth in “juvenile detention centers,” and for school programs about the Negro baseball leagues.

5.  The list consisted of awards for black universities, for Alaskan native dance, for fashion design for the disabled, for teaching girls metalworking, in support of an opera festival by women composers, for “Latinx” events, for youth in “juvenile detention centers,” and for school programs about the Negro baseball leagues. 

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