On Distinguishing Artistic Value from Aesthetic Value

Traditional aestheticians believe that the value of art can be explained solely by aesthetic value that audience can get during going through aesthetic experience which is a peculiar way to perceive an object, since they believe the experience is unique way to perceive artworks. According to them, since the artistic and the aesthetic is synonymous, they don’t need to distinguish the former from the latter. However, after the advent of Avant-garde, artworks have changed so radically that they become to be containers of various values other than aesthetic value such as cognitive, moral, emotional values: they give us abundant information, new points of views, moral lessons, and emotional flexibility. If the change is a right result of observation over our art practices, we, against traditional aestheticians, need to suggest theoretical reasons for necessity of distinguishing artistic value from aesthetic value. For the first reason to distinguish two kinds of values, I argue that the values we get in an interaction with a work of art cannot be fully articulated with the aesthetic value because the experience audience can get from a work of art i.e. art experience cannot be thoroughly explained by aesthetic experience. To avoid a confusion involving in aesthetic experience as an ill-defined concept, I will take Noel Carroll’s definition of aesthetic experience, namely the ‘content-oriented’ approach which explains that an experience is aesthetic only if we appreciate the form or the expressive and aesthetic properties of an object during experiencing it. If we can consider his definition correct, aesthetic experience would not cope with the existence of a non-aesthetic art experience such as audience’s interpretive interaction that recently becomes to play a more important role to appreciate artworks. To interpret a work of art properly, audience does need to observe and infer its meaning and structure on the basis of art tradition and art-historical back ground information where it has its place. Observation and inference are certainly cognitive interactions, which differ from the aesthetic experience of its form and aesthetic properties. And the difference implies that audience can get more various values from art experience which includes non-aesthetic experiences i.e. interpretive interaction, than aesthetic value they do from aesthetic experience. Thus, from the implication, it can be claimed that we need to distinguish the artistic value from the aesthetic value. This paper does not articulate constituents of artistic value, but it opposes to traditional aesthetician’s view and suggests to distinguish artistic value from aesthetic value and to understand it as a wider-ranged value where moral, cognitive or emotional value as well as aesthetic value can be included because of the width of art experience.