Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Contributors
- Preface
- 1 Value and Valuation in Art and Culture: Introduction and Overview
- PART ONE ORIGINS OF MEANING
- PART TWO THE CREATION OF VALUE IN ARTISTIC WORK
- PART THREE CONTINUITY AND INNOVATION
- PART FOUR APPRECIATION AND RANKING
- 11 Quantitative Approaches to Valuation in the Arts, with an Application to Movies
- 12 Confluences of Value: Three Historical Moments
- 13 The Intrinsic Value of a Work of Art: Masaccio and the Chapmans
- 14 Time and Preferences in Cultural Consumption
- PART FIVE CULTURAL POLICIES
- Index
- Plate section
- Plate section
- References
This chapter is part of a book that is no longer available to purchase from Cambridge Core
11 - Quantitative Approaches to Valuation in the Arts, with an Application to Movies
from PART FOUR - APPRECIATION AND RANKING
Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Contributors
- Preface
- 1 Value and Valuation in Art and Culture: Introduction and Overview
- PART ONE ORIGINS OF MEANING
- PART TWO THE CREATION OF VALUE IN ARTISTIC WORK
- PART THREE CONTINUITY AND INNOVATION
- PART FOUR APPRECIATION AND RANKING
- 11 Quantitative Approaches to Valuation in the Arts, with an Application to Movies
- 12 Confluences of Value: Three Historical Moments
- 13 The Intrinsic Value of a Work of Art: Masaccio and the Chapmans
- 14 Time and Preferences in Cultural Consumption
- PART FIVE CULTURAL POLICIES
- Index
- Plate section
- Plate section
- References
Summary
Last year I gave several lectures on “intelligence and the appreciation of music among animals.” Today I am going to speak about “intelligence and the appreciation of music among critics.” The subject is very similar.
Eric Satie, quoted by Machlis (1979: 124)Introduction
The aesthetic evaluation of artworks (paintings, literature, movies, musical compositions or interpretations, etc.) is and always has been a very controversial exercise. Philosophers, starting with Plato, are not the only ones who keep arguing about beauty. Mathematicians (including Leibnitz, Euler, Helmholtz, and Weyl), physiologists (Fechner), biologists (Rashevsky, the founder of mathematical biology), and economists (Bentham and others) have also tried to contribute to the field, and no obvious path-breaking or definitive view has emerged. We find it convenient to follow Shiner (1996) and distinguish between philosophers who suggest that beauty lies in the artwork itself and those like Hume (1757: 6) who believe that “beauty is no quality in things themselves: It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty.”
We identify three ways in which beauty of a work of art can be evaluated: as an attribute of the work, as determined by experts, and as confirmed by the passage of time. We begin this chapter with a brief discussion of these three approaches.
Beauty as an attribute of a work
Trying to break an artwork into attributes (also called properties by analytic philosophers, and characteristics or qualities by economists) is as old as Aristotle, who suggests in his Poetics that an object is defined by its essential attributes.
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- Beyond PriceValue in Culture, Economics, and the Arts, pp. 179 - 199Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2007
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