some acquaintance with the differential calculus is more central. People can
be well educated to various degrees and to various degrees in various
domains, with no sharp, single boundary between the altogether uneducated
and near-universal polymaths. Fuzzy, intermediate education in this or that
is the norm. Yet we have good enough reasons for taking certain persons to
be paradigms of the well educated and for trusting in the job of education
that is done by certain educational institutions, especially where peer review
and openness to public scrutiny are valued. Progressive performance on
many exercises, in many conversations, examinations, and essays, is part
of an open-ended process of becoming more educated, where there is no
need or point – apart from ceremony and professional or economic
credentialization–to settle on any one moment in that process as the single,
decisive moment of becoming educated. Given the complexity and special-
ized character of knowledge, no one will be an expert in assessing whether
anyone whosoever is well educated in any domain whatsoever.
The case is similar with“art.”Like“educated person,”“art”is a status
concept. Artistic value can be exemplified to various degrees in many different
domains. Becoming accomplished at making art and at understanding art
requires extended practice. No one will be fully expert in works in all media
and traditions of art. Practice works and experiments in artistic making can
and should be accepted as having a degree of artistic value without worrying
over their status as masterpieces or failures, as long as the aims in view in
making and for audiences are those that define the practice of art. There is no
reason not to regard the paintings of children, students, and Sunday painters–
however less distinctive and absorbing they may be than the paintings of
Hockney or Matisse–as genuine works of art, as long as the work of making
them is done within an acknowledged medium of art and with some attention
to its aims, as is generally the case. Dewey is surely right to deplore what he
calls“the blundering ineptness...of judicial criticism”^3 that seeks sharp
boundaries in every case and to recommend instead the enterprise of critical
understanding. We have reason enough to think that the status of certain
exemplary works–most denizens of most museums of fine art, most Pulitzer
or Booker prize-winning novels, and so forth–is reliably well settled.
Given, however, the emotional, reputational, and financial stakes that
attach to the identification and evaluation of some objects and performances
(^3) Dewey,Art as Experience, p. 304.
Identifying and evaluating art 169