38
PARTISAN REVIEW
Though I grant that the issue of what's interesting here may be a moot
point for a lot of people.
I realize that I'm simplifying. But I'm not oversimplifying. I'm
stating flatly what hasn 't been stated flatly enough, or often enough
with emphasis. But then the primacy of value judgment in art criticism
used to be taken so much as a matter of course that it didn't have
to
be
stated, much less stated emphatically. The last great art critics I'm
aware of-Julius Meier-Graefe and Roger Fry-simply assumed it, just
as E.D. Hirsch's literary critics did. And it is still assumed, as far as I
can see, in music and architectural criticism, and in literary reviewing
as distinct from "serious" literary criticism, as it isn't in art criticism or
even art reviewing. Which is why I don't feel I'm laboring the obvious
when I harp on the primacy of value judgment in the present context.
Didn't the late Harold Rosenberg say that Taste was an "obsolete
concept"? Didn't another reputable art critic refer recently
to
the
weighing of the quality of specific works of art as "art mysticism"?
To be sure, value judgments of a certain kind-more than enough
of them-are to be met with in the current art press. But they are not
aesthetic value judgments. The values invoked are those of sheerly
phenomenal newness, or of "objectness, " or "information," or "pro–
cess," or of purported demonstrations of the hows of perceiving and
knowing, or of acts and things by which our notion of what's possible
as art is expanded. The critics who take these values'or claims to value
seriously
ipso facto
exclude any appeal to aesthetic value, whether they
realize it or not. To judge from their rhetoric, more often they don't. I
said earlier that implied value judgments abound, and I meant value
judgments that were properly aesthetic, for better or for worse. I want
to correct myself somewhat. Being for the new simply because it's new,
or being for a certain kind of art simply because it's in vogue, doesn't
entail an aesthetic value judgment. Nor does rejecting what seems old–
fashioned simply because it seems that. (Categorical judgments are in
any case never truly aesthetic ones.) What's involved here is something
I'd call aesthetic incapacity: the incapacity lies in letting irrelevant
factors like newness and oldness shut off aesthetic experience, inhibit
the operations of Taste. This amounts to, has amounted to, a kind of
judgment
on
aesthetic experience itself. And it's this judgment, this
disparaging judgment, that seems
to
control too much of what's
offered as criticism of contemporary fine art.
Of course, there's more, and should be more, to art criticism than
the expressing of value judgments. Description, analysis, and interpre–
tation, even interpretation, have their place. But without value judg-
