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PARTISAN REVIEW
It also happens to be the case that what is called
art
cannot be definitely
separated from esthetic experience in general. Anything said about the lat–
ter can also be said about the experience of art. Anything experienced in
the esthetic mode can be said to be experienced as art too, art as such. The
notion of art, put to the test, proves to depend not on skillful making (as
the ancients held), but on an act of mental distancing: art means simply, and
not so simply, a turn of attitude toward something you perceive or intro–
spect. I call this turn an "act of distancing" because it brings about a
mind-set by which whatever it is that's perceived is accepted for its own
experienced sake, and not for what it means in any other terms-not for
what it may signifY in terms other than itself, not for what it suggests in
the way of consequences, not for what it means to you yourself as a par–
ticular person with particular personal or practical or theoretical interests.
These interests and these terms are what you become "distanced" from by
the turn of attitude involved in esthetic, and therefore artistic, experience.
Art,
then, like the esthetic in general, can coincide with everything and
anything conceivable. Anything and everything conceivable can be con–
verted into something that takes effect as art. There turns out, accordingly,
to be such a thing as universal art, art at large, art that is or can be realized
anywhere and at any time-even if it is for the most part inadvertent,
momentary, and solipsistic art: that is, private and unsuitable to being ade–
quately communicated
as art
by the person who experiences it. The big
difference between this art at large and what the world agrees to call art is
between art that is not communicated to another person's attention and art
that is. The one I call private and "raw" art and the other I call public and
formalized art. They are different, but for present purposes I don't consid–
er them radically different. They are both areas of experience constituted
by a certain kind of end-value. And through their orientation to this kind
of value both varieties of art shade into one another, the difference
between them becoming a question of degrees of value more than any–
thing else-more even than a question of communicability, or of the
difference between private and public.
When we deal with esthetic experience or art
qua
esthetic experience
or
qua
art-as nothing but esthetic experience or art-we deal with values
and valuing. And as I've already said, the values here are end-values, intrin–
sic or ultimate ones. Art isn't the domain of any such values. There are
moral values that are ultimate, and these too are (as I think) accessible only
to intuition, to direct insight. Yet not all moral or ethical val ues are intrin–
sic, ultimate ones; some of them are instrumental-that is, means to other,
further moral values-and which, because they are instrumental, can be
discovered through reasoning, not intuition. This is not true of any esthet–
ic or artistic values: they are all final intrinsic values, none of them
