Value in Art

Questions about artistic value are not nicely uniform or all raised at the same level of inquiry. In this article they are divided up into three groups of issues: meta-aesthetic, ontological, and normative. The first of these concern the nature of a judgement of artistic value. The second concerns the nature of such value itself. The last concerns the core question of what is artistically valuable about art, and how one brings the various valuable features of a work to bear in arriving at an evaluation of the work. Though these are different questions, there are not sharp boundaries between them. The article begins with the latter two issues, saving meta-aesthetics for last.