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 Céline 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. 

Gamelyn: An Outlaw’s Ethics

     The master storyteller Chaucer himself seems to have fancied the story of Gamelyn. Literary scholars have also traced its relations to Robin Hood tales, Shakespeare’s As You Like It and to the William Tell legend. Variously described in terms of its affinities to balladry and romance, studied for what it reveals about medieval law, the primary appeal of the plot is its action. The righteous hero moves from one crisis to another and, though he is sufficiently vulnerable to keep the audience engaged like a character of Douglas Fairbanks or Errol Flynn, he is usually capable of vanquishing any number of foes.
     An outlaw’s ethics must be problematic. Someone who has been judged criminal, who has been ousted from civil society for misbehavior, has appearances at any rate against him. Yet Robin Hood’s status as hero is known to everyone, and there were in his day many comparable figures, Adam Bell and Earl Godwin among them. The greenwood may have been dangerous for travelers, but it was also an arena of freedom beyond the reach of unjust feudal authorities. Some outlaws in the English Middle Ages as well as in other times and places have become heroes, “social bandits,” in Hobsbawm’s phrase, seen as allied with the people in opposing an oppressive regime.
     Gamelyn’s perspective is governed by his audience’s socio-economic class. While Robin Hood was regularly identified as a yeoman, neither aristocrat nor peasant, Gamelyn is a member of the land-owning gentry. He is nonetheless as a younger brother vulnerable to exploitation by a coalition including his own brother, the most prominent clerics of the region, and a corrupt legal system. Elements of explicit social protest include criticism of such central pillars of feudalism as the nobility, the church, and the law, but the king’s own judgement is approved, and, in the end, Gamelyn’s reconciliation with the throne sets everything to rights. [1]
     The social order is in question from the very opening when the dying John of Boundes finds that his neighbors, men whom he calls “good men that lawe conne of londe,” (63) mean to controvert his wish to leave property to each of his sons. The sheriff later supports the younger John with concern for neither the law nor ethics. When the younger John binds Gamelyn to a post in his hall, claiming he is insane, he appeals in vain to the clerics feasting there who respond with gratuitous asperity, interested only in currying favor with his wealthy brother. Gamelyn declares “Cursed mote he worth both flesshe and blood,/ That ever doth priour or abbot eny good!" (487-8) Most dramatically, in the scene of the trial of his brother Ote, he realizes the fantasy of the revolutionist and literally brings his elder brother, now become sheriff, the judge, and all twelve jurymen into the role of defendants and summarily executes the lot, declaring by the way “sorwe have that rekke!” [“Sorrow to any who are sorry about it!”] (877)
     Once the outlawed Gamelyn gains access to the King, however, his problems are over. The king not only pardons him and the other outlaws, but awards them “good offices.” (890) The author is not indicting the whole feudal system, only the wicked who must be brought into line by the crown.
     In contrast to the widespread corruption the poet describes in Gamelyn’s neighborhood, the outlaw chief is presented in wholly positive terms. Though his initial words “I am ware of gestes God send us goode” (635) may be taken as either sincerely hospitable or as an ironic welcoming of victims, when Gamelyn tests his host’s courtesy, anticipating “He wil yeve us mete and drink and do us som gode.” (659) the outlaw chief does proceed to treat Adam and Gamelyn most civilly. He “bad hem ete and drink and that of the best.” (676) In this open-hearted generosity in hospitality rituals, the outlaw king recalls Gamelyn’s own extravagant hosting in Fitt 3.
     The sympathetic reader who is not thinking in terms of action movie conventions is likely to be taken aback by the summary killing of the porter at the outset of Fitt III. Gamelyn wreaks angry vengeance, fundamentally opposing his dishonest brother, but incidentally leading him to break the doorkeeper’s neck and toss him in a well. While the action may seem excessive in view of the porter’s trivial and ineffective attempt to keep him out, it is most expressive of his uncontrollable might when roused. Like an old-fashioned swashbuckler or a more recent martial arts adept, he scatters his foes on either side. This is perhaps the earliest form of hero.
     When his elder brother proves impossibly selfish and deceitful, and the local ecclesiastics collude in his wrongdoing, Gamelyn enthusiastically shouts “Save wel the crownes and do hem no harmes,/ But breke both her legges and sithen her armes" (519-20) after which he and Adam pummel the churchmen. Gamelyn proceeds to break his brother’s neck with a single blow, callously telling him "’Sitte ther, brother,’ . . . ‘For to colen thi body as I did myn.’" (535-6)
     His final outburst of violence occurs when at the trial where his brother Ote is being held in his place, when he summarily convicts and executes the judge and jurymen as well as his long-offending brother John. So far is the narrator from considering any of this violence to be excessive or unnecessary, he interjects (passionately if parenthetically) “(sorwe have that rekke!)” (877) (“misery to anyone who cares!}.
     This emphasis on the hero’s strength and fighting abilities is wholly consistent with the king’s eventually not only pardoning him and his outlaw band but awarding them enviable positions. Such muscle is more usefully hired than fought. As a hero of popular culture, Gamelyn excels in scenes of dramatic if almost unbelievable unreflecting action. His ethics are those of the common man: an unthinking acceptance of social norms under most circumstances, a wish to regard oneself as honorable, an honor undamaged, indeed magnified by extravagant violence. The morality is based on the social controls of pride and shame rather than on prescriptive mandates. Gamelyn, one feels certain, would never have turned outlaw had he not been wronged, but his titanic energy must make him seem a somewhat unpredictable associate. The pleasure of those following his story arose perhaps in part from admiration for a strong warrior and in part relief that one need not deal with such a one.
     Gamelyn has a fully happy ending, complete with “a wyf bothe good and feyr” (898), as do most popular works, because this story is meant to be light entertainment, as reassuring as tragedy is unsettling. [2] In fact the heroes of neither action narratives nor tragedies is likely to be concerned with moral choices. A work like Gamelyn simply reaffirms people’s prejudices while one like Oedipus Tyrannos looks beyond right and wrong into the abyss of existence itself. Gamelyn is neither a moral paragon nor an evil-doer as much as he is a regular guy, albeit more daring and capable than his admirers.


1. The reader will recall how the masses who joined in Wat Tyler’s Rebellion in 1381allowed themselves to be deceived by King Richard. Similarly, in the twentieth century, the crowds assembled outside the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg confident that the beneficent Czar would hear their pleas until his troops opened fire.

2. Thus often the Hollywood adaptations of plays and novels tend to rosier denouements as in almost all the generally excellent films made of Tennessee Williams plays during the 1950s.

Axiology and Subjectivity

     Should any reader turn to this page expecting a philosophical discussion, I wish to declare at the outset that I am not competent to paraphrase leading ideas in axiology, far less to comment on them or to criticize. Indeed, that inability is in a way my point, for I wish to suggest that value of all sorts is, like other aspects of reality, always and inevitably subjective, though that fact does not mean that value judgments are arbitrary or without significance.
     In pragmatic decision-making, some, however, may seen hardly disputable: if one wishes to turn a screw, a screwdriver is good, because it does the job efficiently; a city map is good if one wishes to find the train station; food is good since it is required for life. Yet even these include an implied subjectivity. One cannot assume that turning the screw is desirable, or finding the train, or even continuing to live. Each of these consequences is a concrete result. When no such observable cause and effect is involved as in theoretical ethics and even more so in aesthetics, a demonstration of value becomes exceedingly obscure.
     If a critic prefers the novels of Samuel Richardson to those of Henry Fielding (as Leavis does), he may provide ample reasoning and bolster his arguments with supporting evidence from the books in question, yet he cannot, like a scientist, present a compelling “objective” case. Literature and criticism have histories, to be sure, yet it is difficult to conceive of those histories as recording incremental progress over the centuries. The same might be said for all aesthetic judgments. To one individual opera provides the most moving and powerful experience of beauty while another may react only with snores in the manner of George McManus’s comic strip character Jiggs.
     Indeed the situation is no different with all acknowledged matters of taste. Not only art, but food, clothing, style in general is highly subjective. Is Greek retsina wine tasty? Are tattoos becoming? Is a huge SUV beautiful? There is no reasonable way to convince either opponents or proponents to change their attitudes.
     While some would be willing to concede that aesthetic judgments are not subject to proof, many would consider moral and ethical decisions a different matter. Most commonly, due to religious teachings which specifically resist rational investigation, requiring instead faith, people of various traditions claim an absolute, “revealed” certainty in their ethical precepts. Here is a clear case of the power of subjectivity. For internal intuitive reasons that cannot be conveyed to an unbeliever, the faithful accept dogmatic teachings.
     The fact is that, contrary to the claims of some religionists, an entirely adequate system of morality can be elaborated from a simple principle of self-interest. By a secular application of the Golden Rule the entire legal code can be constituted. But my own preference to shrink from theft in order not to worry about my neighbor’s thieving from me, while compelling in practical terms to govern my behavior, is not in fact universal. A considerable share of people do, in fact, steal. Plenty of medieval knights went campaigning for booty. Big businessmen steal from us all while thinking they are exemplary and “successful.” Further, these last examples point out the fact that individuals, ages, and cultures may have significant differences in their definition of theft. Even such an apparently self-evident and natural conclusion as the evil of slavery was never recognized by Moses, Plato, Aristotle, or Christ.
     Furthermore, ethics is clearly a matter between human beings, a social issue, not one related to Ultimate Reality in any way. The cosmos is indifferent to my conduct and any view that looks beyond the human sphere will see that morality does not exist in the Milky Way, only magnificent grandeur. The regulation of human behavior, though a critical element in making life livable, is wholly functional; it exists to accomplish a purpose and not for its own sake.
     Yet, if I might be considered in some ways to display “good behavior,” my motive is not to protect myself. In fact my actions are most generally shaped by a desire to look good if only in my own eyes. Base behavior is ugly; to act in a degraded fashion diminishes oneself. Generous-hearted and compassionate behavior, on the other hand, is beautiful; to act nobly is to become more comely. With eyes open to the phantasmagoria of this world, I selfishly seek to spend my time in the best possible way, keeping myself healthy, learning constantly, bathing in art, trying to deal sympathetically and magnanimously with the people I encounter. And for no other reason than that it feels right to me, it seems the more beautiful choice. I feel as though I react spontaneously and naturally to each choice. While I am quite aware that I have been taught a code of moral response to various situations, I nonetheless experience each decision as a fresh mover expressing my nature. Awareness of my earlier training does not eliminate or invalidate it, though I experience my moral, aesthetic, and culinary decisions as expressing myself, not replicating a formula.
     This should be hardly surprising. It is impossible to escape the subjectivity of our experience of reality. The images on my retina are transformed by strange and elaborate codes translating the activities of all those sub-atomic particles hovering in my office and looking so settled and inert as desks and books and rugs. It means nothing to ask what is real when one’s human consciousness cannot escape setting the parameters of the investigation.
     So we muddle on, making constant value judgments, almost always without conscious consideration, making fallible predictions, feeling our way through the darkness of our general ignorance. If one acquits oneself well, the reward must be in the performance, a graceful turn, a beneficent influence, a settled sense of self at day’s end. Just as some people define themselves through their postings of products on Pinterest, others may turn to Homer, but who is to say which is “best”? We can object if a stranger treads on our toes, but we cannot prescribe a code of morality as though it had absolute value.
     In this way ethical, gastronomic, and aesthetic decisions have much in common. Should a constellation formed of caritas and Beaujolais and Charlie Parker, one evening at a dinner party, cross that of mind-your-own-business and IPAs and Verdi, the two might cross-fertilize like the joyful reshuffling of genes or the vast drifting of galaxies and produce wholly new configurations.