Aesthetic Qualities
Aesthetic Value.
1.
In the shorter piece 'The Price of Art' we looked at the general question of how we might think about the value of a particular painting – that is, how important it is and how much it would cost to buy it. In the course of that article, we noted in passing that one component in the value of a piece was the quality of its aesthetic content. It was a deceptively brief mention which deserves a closer look.
Why might we want to tie down such an elusive quality?
We've already hinted at the two reasons, but let's spell them out.
The first reason is to assess where one artwork stands in relation to others. This could be for something as blunt as the awarding of prizes. More important, it would equip us to direct our own attention and that of others towards the best examples. It is one thing to describe aesthetic value; it is quite another to identify those artworks which best embody or reveal it. Some form of quantifying would enable a guide or tutor to say 'Engage with this artwork and it will present you with Beauty'.
The second reason is to be able to put a price on that component of an artist's work. Having considered the cost of materials and set a price on the expertise and time of the artist, it would enable a seller or bidder to add an amount for that aesthetic component. It would enable the art market proportionately to set it apart from other artworks.
2.
Neither of these two reasons is without problems.
Perhaps the most obvious is the need to establish who would decide on these matters. This is a perennial question in the world of art: 'Who should judge?' In the 18th Century, this debate revolved around the issue of Taste. In those years of the Enlightenment, an influential cadre of people established themselves as the arbiters of aesthetic discernment. Our contemporary equivalents would be, say, the Turner Prize panel. This was not a baseless claim; it appealed to the supposed principles of classical Greece and Rome. And since Taste appeared to be neither innate nor common, it had to be acquired, learned and developed. But far from removing the problem, the various academies and institutions simply kick the problem further down the road. It would be easy to see those bodies as self-perpetuating hierarchies raised to power by like-minded peers. We might well place our trust in them, but that is a choice. We might argue that our choice is informed, but it is nevertheless a choice.
However, simply replacing allegedly elite groups with supposedly more democratic ones doesn't help. It brings us hard up against the Green Lady / Jack Vettriano problem. It also faces the challenge familiar to all democratic movements - 'Most ordinary people do not have the wherewithal to make those judgements' – and we find ourselves looking at elitism again.
This isn't entirely irrational of course. Most people would prefer to travel in a plane piloted by someone drawn from a particular professional elite rather than a committee of the other passengers (however representative it might be). This is not so different from the matter of aesthetic awareness. Just like flying a plane, making judgements about Beauty is not a natural skill we are born with. We might spontaneously declaim 'Oh that is beautiful!', but that isn't an aesthetic judgement against which other objects can be compared. It's not intended that way and, anyway, it is probably far more conditioned than we like to admit. No, aesthetic judgement is not an innate human skill. It has a fairly recent history, emerging in step with the emergence of cultural objects – objects created increasingly for admiration, pleasure and reverence rather than usefulness. Aesthetic sense is still recent enough in evolutionary terms for us to need to acquire it.
We might decide then that since aesthetic judgement is a skill which must be learned, we do indeed need specialists to help us make those judgements. And if we haven't already begun to feel that we travelling in circles, we do now. Human society simply hasn't come up with a better idea for assessing aestheticians than peer-assessment by those who are like them.
3.
But drilling down into the 'Says who?' question has left to one side 'Says what?' Just what are these aesthetic qualities we are asking people (whomever they might be) to discern and to quantify?
There are good reasons for beginning with Goodness, Truth and Beauty. Ancient languages – not only Greek but at least Hebrew too – made a semantic connection between the three. One could not speak of one without involving the others. The connection is made by others too:
Beauty is truth, truth beauty'—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
Ode on a Grecian Urn
Keats, 1819
If we allow those three qualities places in the first rank, a second rank might be Balance, Harmony, and Integrity. A third rank might include Engagement, Invitation and Emotion and so on. These latter six come from my imagination, but they seem to me to flow from the first three. Precisely what these huge words mean must be left to philosophers (even though there might be an angry debate). But we have Wittgenstein to thank for being confident to use words without having to be able to precisely define them.
4.
But before we go too far in describing aesthetic qualities, there is yet another question we need to address: Are qualities such as Beauty and so on Absolute or Relative? Is there, somewhere, an absolute standard of Beauty against which anything which claims to be beautiful can be compared? Or is Beauty truly in the eye of the beholder? Can something be beautiful to me but not to you, and both be right?
This is very important - it's not simply playing with words. If Beauty is a Relative quality, then - bluntly - who gives a toss what an aesthetician says? If it's beautiful to me, then ... it's beautiful to me. This has quite an appeal especially in what we used to call a postmodern society (where there is the wholesale rejection of grand explanations or metanarratives). It feels more democratic. It also lets us off the hook of having to say precisely (or even vaguely) what we mean by 'beautiful'. It seems so sensible to contemporary ears that when one describes what an Absolute quality is, we sound like deluded fantasists.
And yet the idea that somewhere there was an absolute standard for all such qualities and virtues has a respectable pedigree and was fairly widespread until recently. Major religions such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Judaism and Christianity saw all those Absolutes embraced by God (or the equivalent). The Christian statement "God is Love" is a prime example: God is not simply loving, God is Love. Any experience or expression of Love finds its origin in God. It was also a familiar theme in the work of Plato. His Realm of Forms was where one found the Ideal Prototypes of everything which had any real existence in ordinary life.
Are these our only options? That aesthetic values such as Beauty either reside in some imagined other existence, or they are entirely relative to each person who perceives them? I would like to suggest a third way.
The classical architect Vitruvius described in his De Architectura how perfect proportions were derived from the human body. We find this represented in Leonardo da Vinci's famous Vitruvian Man.
With the benefit of evolutionary theory, we might understand this idea as following: that the proportions which our bodies have evolved naturally seem 'right' to us, and that sense extends to every expression of them we find in the world. Wherever we discern those proportions we will find balance, harmony and a quality which we come to call beauty. This is not beyond challenge: we know that we often find beauty in asymmetry, for example. Nevertheless, as a broad principle, it seems to make sense. And it is precisely the one argued for in the Enlightenment pursuit of Taste: that there is something essentially natural and therefore beautiful (and enduringly so) in classical design because it is founded on the human form.
But we don't have to restrict our selves to anthropocentric examples. I am struck by the fact that mathematicians use the adjective 'elegance' to describe the most concise, pure and simple arguments. In a telling passage in his book Mysticism and Logic Bertrand Russell says this:
Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty—a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show.
I am not a mathematician, but here is just one example which impresses me - the Fibonacci sequence of numbers ( 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13... and so on) is at the basis of trees' and plants' branching systems, spirals found in snail shells and elsewhere, the spreading patterns of ground-hugging plants, the breeding patterns of rabbits, the shape of pineapples and pine cones, the dispersal of matter in star systems, and on and on. Now we don't need to resort to any supernatural explanations for this. These are the proportions and patterns which are most energy-conserving or best suited for accessing resources. In other words, by either the laws of physics or the rigours of natural selection, this is how things evolve. And we often find the results pleasing in appearance.
I would want to argue then that Beauty can be an objectively perceived quality, not because it is imposed from the outside, but because awareness of it has grown within us. We have evolved ourselves, and we have come to find some of the fundamental driving engines of evolution intuitively pleasing.
Does this feel a long way from a painting of a bowl of peaches by Cezanne?
It isn't really. It is saying that if we find Beauty in that painting it is because in some way it resonates with those foundational dynamics which brought us and the universe around us into being.
5.
So what about the question of monetary value?
It is one thing for an artwork to enjoy a consensus of opinion that it has a high aesthetic content. It is quite another to say how much should be added to its price in the market to reflect that content. In the gallery or the auction, it is far more likely to be the dynamic of scarcity and demand which determines the price. If a vendor asks more than the customer is willing to pay, s/he will be left with stock in the showroom.
Of course, the customer might make their own assessment of the aesthetic value, and be willing to pay more (in practice this only takes place in an auction). If enough customers do this with a particular artist, then that artist's work becomes in demand and, again. the price will rise. Ironically, this introduces a democratic (and relative) element into a process which began as one initiated by experts calling on absolute standards. At the same time, it is a process that is only in part concerned with aesthetic judgments - the demand having inflated the price.
And after all this, it has to be conceded that aesthetic qualities cannot be quantified. To the question 'How beautiful is this?' we can only answer 'Very' or similar. If we were asked 'On a scale of 1 to 10, how beautiful is this?' we couldn't answer since it is impossible to say what 1 or 10 might indicate.
This ought to serve to remind us that the market price of an artwork only says something about its aesthetic value in part. Price and value are not necessarily the same thing.