The Uses of Reason in the Evaluation of Artworks: Commentaries on the Turner Prize

166 Pages·2017·5.2 MB·English

by  Les Gillon (auth.)

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The Uses of Reason in the
Evaluation of Artworks
Les Gillon
The Uses of Reason
in the Evaluation
of Artworks
Commentaries on the Turner Prize
Les Gillon
School of Film, Media and Performance
University of Central Lancashire
Preston, UK
ISBN 978-3-319-56365-7 ISBN 978-3-319-56366-4 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-56366-4
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017939552
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My thanks to Brian Rosebury, Peter Herissone-Kelly, Paul Humble, Peter
Lucas and Jennifer Hartshorn for their comments and suggestions
C
ontents
1 The Turner Prize and the Problem of Evaluation 1
2 But Is It Art? 15
3 Tomma Abts: Form and Value 49
4 Noel Carroll and the Art of Slapstick 73
5 But What Does it Mean? 101
6 Martin Creed: Ideas in an Empty Room 127
7 Ideal Critics and the Uses of Reason 149
Index 161
vii
CHAPTER 1
The Turner Prize and the Problem
of Evaluation
the Problem of evaluation
Each year, when the Turner Prize is awarded, the Tate Gallery issues a
short statement to explain why the winner’s artworks were chosen as the
best. In the weeks leading up to the announcement of the winner, the
work of all the nominees will have been reviewed and appraised many
times in the press, and those critics too will have given explanations for
the judgements they have made. When the critics pass judgements on
works of art, there is an assumption that they are not simply offering
their own opinions or confiding their personal tastes. Their statements
are read as normative and they seem to offer reasons for their judge-
ments. Since reasons are given to support their judgements, it might
seem safe to assume that those justifications are based on general princi-
ples: that some kind of agreed-upon criteria are applied.
However, the controversial nature of the Prize and the avant-gardism
of many of the nominees have prompted some to wonder what crite-
ria are actually being applied, both by the Turner Prize jury and by the
professional art critics whose published verdicts are often at odds with
that of the jury, and also often at odds with each other. These questions
about the criteria by which excellence in art is judged are not confined
to debates about the Turner Prize. They have been a very longstanding
feature of debates within the field of philosophical aesthetics; current
academic papers on the subject regularly address issues first raised in the
writings of Hume and Kant.
© The Author(s) 2017 1
L. Gillon, The Uses of Reason in the Evaluation of Artworks,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-56366-4_1
2 1 THE TURNER PRIZE AND THE PROBLEM OF EVALUATION
If the Turner Prize jury wanted to find assessment criteria to use in
their work, there is no shortage of possible criteria on offer: beauty,
skill, didactic value, emotional expressiveness and originality are among
the many that have been suggested by writers on the subject. Monroe
Beardsley1 proposed coherence, unity and intensity as the three criteria;
for Clive Bell it was what he called ‘significant form’.2
However, it would not be a straightforward matter to decide which of
these criteria are the correct ones to apply to the Turner Prize; indeed, it
is not a straightforward matter to decide which of these criteria are the
correct ones to apply to art in general. The problem is not that there is a
lack of criteria, but that there are too many. Not all the criteria that have
been proposed are compatible with each other; different suggested cri-
teria often reflect different views about the nature of art and its purpose.
There is no one set of what have been called ‘aesthetic’3 principles that
commands unanimous approval. One problem that dogs any attempt to
formulate such principles is that it is often found that their application
seems to inevitably throw up exceptional cases or yield results that seem
perverse. As Sydney Hook describes the problem:
Just as soon as anyone offers a criterion or rule for a judgement of excel-
lence, someone else will show that in fact we make judgements of excel-
lence, which are widely shared by competent critics, independently of the
criterion, or that some work of art to which the criterion or rule clearly
applied was not uniformly judged excellent by competent critics.4
This has led some to be sceptical about the possibility of formulating any
universally agreed criteria and to deny the need for such aesthetic prin-
ciples. Frank Sibley5 was one of those who took that view, and we will
consider some aspects of his approach to the role of the critic within this
study.
If there is a problem with the reasons critics offer in support of their
judgements, then that has significant implications. If the relationship
between critics’ judgements and the reasons they give for those judge-
ments is questionable, then it might be said that the very reasonableness
of criticism as an activity must also be in question. If the task of those
who claim that evaluation is impossible, unless based on critical criteria,
has been to formulate those criteria or explain their absence, the task of
those who deny the possibility of general criteria has been to explain how
critical evaluation can nonetheless claim to be a rational activity.
THE PROBLEM OF EVALUATION 3
Of course, for the professional critic, one possible way of dissolv-
ing the problem might be to conclude that evaluation is no more than
expression of preference and has no place in critical practice. Indeed,
there is evidence of the extent to which non-evaluative critical practices
have taken hold in the field of professional art criticism. In 2003 a survey
conducted in the United States found that three quarters of professional
art critics believed that the evaluation of artworks was the least important
aspect of their work.6
In 2009 Noel Carroll published On Criticism, partly in an attempt
to counter this apparent ambivalence on the part of professional art crit-
ics about critical evaluation. While the survey appeared to show that
most professional art critics considered the evaluation of artworks to be
peripheral or irrelevant to their work, Carroll argued that evaluation is in
fact the central and essential purpose of criticism. In his view, the down-
grading of evaluation would amount to a dereliction of duty on the part
of the critic. Carroll places the blame for this retreat from critical evalu-
ation on the emergence of philosophical positions and critical fashions
that have led critics to feel that ‘there is something counter-productive,
suspect, illegitimate, or even impossible about regarding criticism as
essentially evaluative’.7 In the course of his argument for the centrality
of evaluation, he challenges a number of the anti-evaluative arguments
and assumptions that have emerged from a range of twentieth-century
philosophical tendencies and ideas, ranging from anti-intentionalism to
Post-modernist critical theory.
Carroll also attempts to counter the arguments of those who would
downgrade critical evaluation on the grounds that, if there are no agreed
standards against which the artwork can be measured, any evaluation
given by a critic must be purely subjective. In response to that argu-
ment, Carroll denies that it is impossible to formulate appropriate criteria
against which an artwork can be evaluated. He offers a model of criteria-
based evaluation, arguing that it represents a version of the approach that
is not vulnerable to the difficulties that have beset earlier attempts to for-
mulate critical principles. In Chap. 4 I will examine whether that model
could work in the context of the Turner Prize.
Sibley took a quite different view on this question. Like Carroll, he
saw evaluation as an important element in the role of the critic, but he
did not believe that the formulation of aesthetic principles was possible,
nor did he see the necessity for it. He emphasised the critical importance
of basing evaluations on perceptual judgements of individual artworks.
4 1 THE TURNER PRIZE AND THE PROBLEM OF EVALUATION
The skill of the critic lies in the ability to perceive the aesthetic qualities
of an artwork and then the skill to communicate those qualities to oth-
ers, aiming to open people’s eyes to significant features of the work. In
the absence of general criteria, the critic’s role is to expose the particular
aesthetic qualities of each individual artwork, drawing the viewers’ atten-
tion to those qualities through description, gesture, analysis, the use of
metaphors and so on, in order that the viewers are moved to see those
qualities for themselves.
However, the difficulty for those who deny that art can be judged
against criteria is to show how, in the absence of criteria providing a logi-
cal connection between critical judgements and the reasons given to sup-
port those judgements, the critic’s evaluation, however well expressed,
can be regarded as anything other than a statement of subjective personal
opinion. Moreover, for the critics covering the Turner Prize there is a
requirement to do more than perceive and communicate the aesthetic
qualities of individual artworks in isolation. They are also required to
make explicit comparative evaluations of the work of the different short-
listed artists. Sibley’s picture of the critic does not suggest an obvious
methodology; the critic’s ability to perceive and communicate the aes-
thetic merits of the work does not in itself provide a basis for arriving at
comparative evaluations.
As I have said, the question of on what basis we can justify a claim
that an artwork is beautiful, or that it is moving, or that one artwork is
better than another, is a longstanding issue within aesthetics. This study
will enquire into some aspects of that issue, but the approach taken will
not solely engage with philosophical debates relevant to the issue, but
will also look at how this issue is dealt with in practice by experienced
professional art critics. For that purpose, I have looked to the commen-
taries surrounding the Turner Prize as a source of evidence.
Why the turner Prize?
My approach to this problem is to explore the perspectives provided
by different theories of critical evaluation by placing them in dialogue
with an empirical examination of actual critical practice in the visual
arts. Critical evaluation of the visual arts has provided many of the clas-
sic examples used by key figures in the philosophical debate and it offers
rich scope for comparative studies of critical evaluations across time and
between well-defined critical schools. The Turner Prize provides an