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NICHOLAS F. STANG, Artworks Are Not Valuable for Their Own Sake, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Volume 70, Issue 3, August 2012, Pages 271–280, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-6245.2012.01519.x
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Extract
i.introduction
Many philosophers and critics of art believe that:
(FVT) Artistic value, the value that works of art as such have, is a kind of ‘final’ value; objects that possess artistic value are valuable for their own sake in virtue of their value as art.
I will refer to this as the Final Value Thesis (FVT).1 In this article, I argue that the FVT is false. Artistically valuable works of art are not, as such, valuable for their own sake.2 Some artistically valuable works of art may be valuable for their own sake, but for reasons distinct from their artistic value. For the sake of brevity, though, throughout this article (as I have done in the title) I simply write that artworks are not valuable for their own sake. In every case, I use this to mean the denial of the FVT.3
I begin by examining experiential or empiricist theories of artistic value, according to which the artistic value of a work of art consists in the final value of the experiences that work affords. This appears to entail that works are not valuable for their own sake, but valuable only for the sake of the experiences they afford. However, the defenders of the experiential view deny that their view has this consequence; they do so because they share the common assumption that the FVT is true.
