In the final chapter of Challenging Art, “Legacies,” Barbara Rose is quoted wondering about the widely noted moral (or moralistic) tone of Artforum’s writers, asking “[Isn’t] it incredible that the art critical dialogue was focused on moral issues?” To which one can only reply, no, not really. It’s such a common occurrence in art criticism across very different moments in time that one is probably more surprised when it doesn’t appear. There are loads of ideological art history exposés, if you will, of the mixed nature of a given critical discourse at some moment in the past, often presented as an unmasking of the power relations at work in how certain styles were championed over others. Some of these studies are tedious and tendentious, but not all. In a more general way, consider the famous opposition of colore and designo and all of the moral freight those terms were made to handle. Critical mixings of art and morality are quite common.
Think about your own reaction, for that matter - how you feel about a work of art especially close to the heart. Often the admiration for the quality of the art leads to other feelings: the identification of this art, this style, with the good and true things of the world, seeing it as an example of freedom, of civilization, as any sort of high-minded moral (or even political) value. It is not surprising that when defending the status of this artwork to those who don’t necessarily share one’s view that these other values will get mixed in to the argument.
And perhaps it should be that way. I’m not saying that moral and aesthetic judgments are the same thing, but they are both forms of judgment. Kant’s explanation of aesthetic judgment as involving a sense of purposiveness without purpose, the feeling that the glowing sunset or delicate flower one is thrilled by were intended even though no actual intention can be found, has always struck me a presenting a sort of virtual argument from design. We can’t perceive a purpose to the beauty we see – but we feel one, and wonder why. The non-rule based nature of Kant's aesthetic faculty also makes me think of it as systemized cousin to Aristotelian ethics. Aesthetic and ethical judgments both happen intuitively, in a sense, and are not predetermined. While neither one reduces to the other, the interweaving of art and morality seems inevitable; and as Hannah Arendt noted, politics is a matter of judgment as well.
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