Beauty and Artistic Value

This chapter defuses anti-beauty and pro-beauty arguments by offering a more adequate account of artistic beauty. We argue that neither beauty, nor extra-beauty concerns should be discarded as values of art. Therefore, we distinguish artistic beauty from both aesthetic excellence and beauty as such. Hence, when we judge that an artwork is aesthetically valuable, it does not automatically follow that the artwork is beautiful. If artistic beauty is equated with aesthetic excellence then the notion of beauty is stretched almost beyond recognition or many non-beautiful artworks are denied aesthetic value. Moreover, the beauty of an artwork does not plainly coincide with beauty per se. Many artworks can be perceived as beautiful, but this does not automatically entail that the perceived beauty is an aesthetic merit of the artwork, i.e. that it contributes to the artwork’s artistic value. Furthermore, if the beauty of an artwork contradicts or diminishes other properties of an artwork, the artwork’s beauty counts as an aesthetic demerit. Properly drawing these distinctions is of paramount importance for the following reasons. (1) These distinctions allow us to assign aesthetic excellence to non-beautiful art. There is no need to include non-beautiful art within the realm of beauty in order to judge such artworks as aesthetically valuable. (2) These distinctions help clarifying why not all beauty in art counts as artistic beauty. Beauty that is incidental or contradicts the aims or content of the artwork is not artistic beauty. Thus, surface beauty in art does not necessarily imply artistic beauty or aesthetic merit. (3) Artistic beauty is not the mere representation of a beautiful thing. What is ugly in nature can be beautiful in art. We conclude that these distinctions are useful for assessing the role of beauty and aesthetics in art.