as successful art, it is unlikely that audiences in general will be able to
sustain relaxed attitudes toward candidate works on all occasions. Outrage
that anyone could takethatseriously, on the one hand, and frustrated
incomprehension that anyone could fail to respond tothis, on the other, are
likely to continue to occur for some audiences with respect to some works.
Even if we cannot specify procedures that will yield exhaustive classifications
with sharp boundaries, it would be nice to know just how we might best
identify and evaluate things, on the basis of which feelings and reasons, and
with what hope, if any, of convergence over time. Just what do we do, and
how do we and should we do it?Subjectivism and the sociology of taste: Smith and Bourdieu
Views about the answers to these questions range over a considerable spec-
trum running from subjectivism or the view that identifications and evalu-
ations are nothing but individual preferences, with no possible basis in
reasons, to objectivism or the view that identifications are full-bloodedly true
or false: anyone issuing any verdict will be getting something right or wrong
(perhaps provably so; perhaps not); there is a fact of the matter about the
status of any given object or performance as art.
Toward the subjective side of the spectrum, Barbara Herrnstein Smith has
argued that all value, including artistic value, is projected variably on to
things by human beings on the basis of contingent, changing needs and
interests.“All value,”she claims,“is radically contingent, being neither a
fixed attribute, an inherent quality, or an objective property of things but,
rather, an effect of multiple, continuously changing, and continuously inter-
acting variables.”^4 That is, there is neither anything awaiting discovery in
any object that might ground our attributions of value to it, nor can there be
consensus about such attributions founded on common human interests and
powers, for no interests and powers are fully shared. Though there may be
certain measures of local and temporary agreement, in the long run and over
larger populations we just disagree in attributing artistic value.“The trad-
itional discourse of value,”which takes value judgments to be objective
matters involving either discovery of properties or answerability to shared(^4) Barbara Herrnstein Smith,Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 30.
170 An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art