Why do we think that art is important?  We share the view that it has a profundity that merits our special attention.  We also think that art has a value that sits uneasily with our usual property rules of resource allocation, because it seems some great works of art cannot really be owned in the ordinary way.  It is at least questionable that someone can buy a great painting just to keep it in a bank vault for years while it appreciates in value.  Nor do great works of art appear to be like the normal sort of public good, like water, or gas, or a national railway.  Yet when we compare art’s worth to, say, that of technology, it is not clear why art is so grand.  We could not view the classical Roman columns everywhere in London without reinforced concrete and mathematical formulae, for example, and, while technology can feed, shelter, clothe and heal us, art can do none of these things.  

In order to solve these problems, I shall attempt to establish that art shares, with some other objects, a special status, which requires decisions about the distribution and ownership of art works to be made differently from normal arguments about individual or community rights to property.

Art as feelings.  Consider how we approach a work of art.  We might identify its personal value to us, viewed as a matter of the subjective experience that it instils in us, perhaps in the form of heightened feelings.  When we go to a Vermeer exhibition, we experience feelings of beauty that Vermeer conveys to us.  The idea that art is good because it induces feelings in us has been common amongst writers.  Tolstoy, for example, said that something could be art ‘only if the spectators are infected by the feelings which the artist has felt’:

‘The activity of art is based on the fact that a man receiving through his sense of hearing or sight another man’s expression of feeling, is capable of experiencing the emotion which moved the man who expressed it.  To take the simple example: one man laughs and another, who hears, becomes merry; or a man weeps and another, who hears, feels sorrow.  A man is excited or irritated, and another man, seeing him, is brought to a similar state of mind.  By his movements or by the sounds of his voice a man expresses courage and determination or sadness and calmness, and this state of mind passes on to others.’

Tolstoy thought that a corollary of this view was that the quality of a work of art was to be judged in terms of the quality of the feelings evoked.  We determine a work’s status as art, and its quality, he said, by reference to expression of the individuality, the clarity and the sincerity of the artist’s feelings.  He thought in some cases individuality of feeling predominated over clarity and sincerity, in others sincerity predominated, and so on, such that a complex judgement about the work could be made according to the difference in degree of these three conditions.  Nevertheless, in the end, the important criterion was that of the invocation of human feelings.

    There are, however, notorious problems with thinking art is just about evoking feelings.  First, our appreciation of art seems to depend more on a critical assessment of the worth of a painting, or piece of music, or a play.  By virtue of this assessment, we value the painting, or whatever, in a more complex way than by merely reporting the feelings we have had.  The more natural way of looking at a painting is to make some initial judgement about its worth and then have a feeling about it (awe, say) and that is a reaction to our judgement about it.  One way of supporting this point is to consider whether, if someone expresses a feeling of awe about a painting, that feeling is supported by a reason.  Why is it, you might ask, that you have that feeling?  Sometimes, of course, the answer is simply ‘I don’t know why – I just have it’ but that itself is consistent with supposing that there is a reason but that the person cannot articulate what it is.  The same sort of point can be made about morality.  It is not enough just to report a feeling one has about some action to determine whether that action has the quality it is claimed to have.  ‘The thought of abortion makes me feel sick’ is not a sufficient argument to support the conclusion that abortion is wrong.  Rather, it is the judgement that abortion is wrong that moves that person to have those feelings she claims to have about abortion.  

    In fact, the argument goes further than just establishing that judgement comes before feeling, because, once we have made a critical assessment about a work of art’s value, we discover, not only whether a feeling we have about it is appropriate or not, but whether any person’s feeling about it is appropriate.  Our judgements about such matters, in other words, imply some degree of objectivity, and this is as true for judgements about art as it is for judgements about morality.  Our judgement about the value of King Lear will make us critical of someone who found the play ‘a great laugh’.  We can therefore detach the idea of art-as-feelings completely from any particular feelings that people have on viewing, or experiencing it.  Indeed, if we supposed that what was happening when we viewed art, was merely ‘having feelings’, then we might be motivated to avoid some of the greatest works of art of all, because the emotional experience would be too harrowing.  The eye-plucking scene in Lear would have people running from the theatre!  

    But there is a stronger objection to the idea that art is about feelings.  Art’s value, I suggest, is to be found in the value of its own existence, independent of its doing anything for us.  We admire art because of this independent value, and so admire it as ‘art for art’s sake’.  Looking at art this way introduces us to art’s austere quality, through which we respect art, not for anything it ‘does’ for us, but because understanding it properly requires understanding of something of importance, perhaps great importance, about the world.  And so we say that we want to look at a painting by Van Gogh because it is wonderful, not that it is wonderful because we want to look at it.  This way of looking at art borrows from the great German philosopher Kant, who not only asserted art’s independent value, but took the point even further.  The appreciation of art, he thought, was akin to moral appreciation and capable of expressing our highest aspirations.

‘Taste makes, as it were, the transition from the charm of sense to habitual moral interest possible without too violent a leap, for it represents the imagination, even in its freedom, as amenable to a final determination for understanding, and teaches us to find, even in sensuous objects, a free delight apart from any charm of sense.’

Intrinsic or sacred value.  If we view art as having value in this independent way, we can say, following Ronald Dworkin, that art has ‘intrinsic’ value, meaning that art is valuable in itself, and independent of what people enjoy, or want, or what is good for them.   We can describe this kind of value in different ways.  We can say, for example, that art is ‘inviolable’, meaning that something important is lost by its destruction.  Horror at the destruction of the giant Buddha in Afghanistan by the Taliban is not dependent on the loss of pleasure that we ourselves would have gained from it – for I can feel that horror, without contemplating that I might ever have seen it.  Instead, the horror arises from the fact that something unique, and of great significance, has gone forever.  It is that it no longer exists, even though I might never have seen it had not been destroyed, that is the important point.  Of course, one could say that what is wrong with its destruction is precisely that no-one can every again see it, but this would not be to capture the point.  If the giant Buddha had not been destroyed but, say, had somehow been deposited intact on the surface of the moon, no-one would be able to see it, but, it seems to me, something of value has still been saved.

    Expressing the same point, we could also say that art has a ‘sacred’ quality.  That something is sacred is independent of our judgement of the difference that its being a sacred object would make to our lives.  This is what the idea of the sacred means.  ‘Being sacred’ has independent meaning for us, a meaning which requires careful reflection, not in terms of the benefit that sacred objects might bring to us (although we might believe that, too), but in terms of the intrinsic value that they possess in themselves.  The idea that God is sacred must be quite independent of whether or not we would find God useful in our lives.  Indeed, it is blasphemous to suggest that God’s sacredness, or His intrinsic value, is dependent on his use or benefit to us because it suggests that, as soon as he is no longer of benefit to us, we can dispense with Him altogether.  Rather, it is because He is sacred that we make our lives useful to Him (although we might benefit from doing so).  The idea is fundamental to religious belief, of course, but I see no necessity for restricting its use to religious objects, and it seems that it is the same kind of importance that we attach to sacred objects that we attach to intrinsic objects.  It is important to turn our attention to this special category of the intrinsic because, of course, many intrinsically good objects of art are, at the same time, sacred objects, such as the giant Buddha.