violates certain principles of communicability, coherence, order, and the
experiential goals of pleasure and affect, that is, if an artist creates art
that undermines aesthetic experience, we may speak of a kind of “artis-
tic delinquency.”
And what do we do with artistic delinquents? We do not curb their
freedom, but we are perfectly within our rights (and perhaps we even
have a duty) to denounce their art, to warn others of its harmful conse-
quences. This appeal to “denunciation” is inspired by an insight Mill
articulates:Though doing no wrong to any one, a person may so act as to compel us to
judge him, and feel to him, as a fool, or as a being of an inferior order....
We have a right, also, in various ways, to act upon our unfavourable opin-
ion of any one, not to the oppression of his individuality, but in the exercise
of ours. We are not bound, for example, to seek his society; we have a right
to avoid it (though not to parade the avoidance), for we have a right to
choose the society most acceptable to us. We have a right, and it may be our
duty, to caution others against him, if we think his example or conversation
likely to have a pernicious effect on those with whom he associates. (On
Liberty, 77–78)So, if we think that a certain kind of art is “likely to have a pernicious
effect” on the very future of art in general, it behooves us to communi-
cate that to others, to try to prevent the possible harm.
Now, this may sound quite troubling to some ears, with my talk of
“protecting art” and of “preventing future harms,” it may seem that I am
interested in creating something that no liberal would welcome, a most
paternalistic environment for the arts, that is, the creation of a sort of
“taste police” (analogous to the “moral police” introduced by Mill in his
essay, which places inappropriate limits on the freedom of individuals in
a given society). A taste police would not help with the problem I have
been diagnosing: a wide variety of works of art may have what I am call-
ing a humanizing function, and yet be radically different in terms of
their aesthetic merit. Bad art is not as threatening to the future of art as
art that destroys the very possibility of aesthetic experience, undermin-
ing the humanizing function of art.
For the “sake of the greater good of human freedom,”^35 we can and
should put up with many offenses, including aesthetic ones. But those
acts of artistic delinquency that put the future of art into harm’s way
stand in need of denunciation, a warning bell that will help to stave off
the danger of undermining the humanizing function of art. Nothing I92 Elizabeth Millán