Throw The Baby Out With The Bathwater

On The Relationship Between Taste and Art Value

Résumé

In my study, I discuss Noël Carroll’s essay Forget taste!, published a few years ago, and through this, the “objectivist” theories of contemporary art value theories. Carroll’s article primarily seeks to expel the problem of taste from the philosophical discourse of art value, thereby opening the door to a cognitivist theory that establishes art value as a well-descriptible object property. Carroll, however, makes a mistake: from his legitimate criticism of aesthetic value hedonism, he unfoundedly concludes that an objective way of treating art value is desirable. I argue that Carroll, like other contemporary authors with a similar position, does not sufficiently take into account the fundamental characteristic of modern art value, which is becoming partly independent, namely that it exists by us and for us. I argue that the classical antinomies of “good taste” stem mostly from the latter, from the “recognition” that the values ​​of art arise from our shared social activities, our value-setting practices, and can only be realized in our artistic experiences. That is why we still consider the empirical fact that the majority of people living in our societies do not “like” those works that, for example, the profession unanimously considers valuable to be a serious theoretical problem. Finally, I outline a theory of value that is “subjectivist” but not based on the pleasures of the isolated individual, could be able to establish a substantive discourse on artistic value in a way that deviates from the approach of the “objectivists”.