Topics Art

Question Is artistic merit necessary for a work of art to be considered art and how can it be assessed? Is a thirty minute pornographic clip of two people having sex merely bad art or is not art at all? If I consider it better than Schindler's List and Roger Ebert does not, how do we determine which view is "right?"

Accepted:
July 3, 2013

Comments

The answers to your questions will depend somewhat on which view of art we pick. What follows is vastly over-simple, but here we go:

On one broad class of views, nothing can be a work of art unless it has "aesthetic" properties. One version: it must be able to induce a kind of absorbed contemplation of the object's qualities. Porn, when it's doing its job, produces a rather different effect. (Of course so do a great many things that really count as art. The argument might be that those thing at least allow and reward a more detached contemplation. Your mileage may vary.)

Of course a film could be highly erotic -- even pornographic -- and yet have various aesthetic qualities that reward attention. But a dull and workaday piece of porn probably won't, and so isn't likely to count as art on aesthetic views.

A different kind of account holds that whether something is art can't be gleaned by considering the object itself. On this sort of view, what makes something art is that artists, galleries, critics and the "artworld" more generally considers it art. In slogan form: it's art if the artworld says it is. So suppose a recognized artist uses a badly-produced piece of porn to make some sort of artistic point, and the artworld goes along. Then your grainy porn of two schlumps stoically pumping away would enter the artworld and acquire the status of art. It might even have artistic merit. It's just that its artistic merit wouldn't be aesthetic merit, if we use that phrase for certain qualities of the work itself. It would have to do with the artistic "gesture" the artist made by using the porn in the way he did.

As for your tiff with Roger Ebert, the mere fact that you "considered" the dull and grainy porn flic better than Schindler's List or Citizen Caine or whatnot wouldn't get us very far. Judgments of artistic merit can be argued for. If you really think Grunts and Moans is better than Cries and Whispers, then you'll need to give some reasons; those reasons can be discussed and evaluated.

It's not always possible to settle disputes about which piece of art is better than which, but we sometimes can and we sometimes do. If we're comparing paintings, we might consider composition, use of color, handling of paint... For films it will be things such as direction, cinematography, editing... Disagreements about such things are often not conclusive, but there are plenty of clear cases, even if there's no easy way to spell out the rules.