LEMMA — The Artistic Judgement

— Cornelis de Bondt

See also: ESSAY — The Artistic Judgement

To pass a pure taste judgement, three necessary conditions can be formulated, alongside three perspectives. The conditions are: disinterestedness, excellence, and exemplarity. The perspectives are: concept, context, and consistency. These perspectives and conditions are complementary, not exclusive; they relate to each other and must therefore be interrelated.

For my research, l will focus on what I will call pure art, meaning art where the artistic process is not tied to a (legal) interest. Not because engaged art couldn’t be exceptionally valuable and fundamentally important, but to examine the issue of pure artistic judgement as sharply as possible. Pure artistic judgement can ultimately also play a role in assessing engaged art, not only to consider its artistic merit but also because the conditions and perspectives formulated below can be used for the engaged part of the artwork as well.

The three conditions:

• Disinterestedness — The creative work must not be tied to any interest, whether financial, political, or in general, legal. It is worth emphasizing: this applies only to the artistic work itself, not to the livelihood or expenses of the artists. Furthermore, it is independent of the fact that a work created without interest can still be important.
  
• Excellence — This condition refers to the Ancient Greek concept of ‘aretē’, usually translated as ‘virtue’, but this term is unusable for us due to its association with bourgeois ‘decency’. Aretē decisively meant excellence, with Odysseus as the grand example: he was clever and cunning, could run like no other, strong — no one could bend his bow — and he was also a poet and witty. We call a work excellent when ‘everything fits’, meaning that the concept of the work is in good proportion with the structure and materials used, with the context, and that it is consistently developed.
  
• Exemplarity — This condition is derived from Kant’s concept of genius. Genius does not refer to the romantic figure of the troubled artist, but the Kantian concept indicating the ‘talent’ with which the artist applies regularities in their free creative process. The word is a reference to the ancient Roman god Genius, who watches over our lives and deaths; for example, the word ‘generate’ is derived from it. Genius makes a work original and exemplary. Freedom is the gift to deal with limitations; choices are made freely, but it is a present but all too comfortable misunderstanding to think that freedom is a lack; namely the lack of choices, and thereby the right to everything. Artistic laws serve free, personal choices, the aesthetic process of creation. Art is precisely about this, apparently contradictory, tension between the personal and the general. It is genius that knows how to turn this tension into a masterpiece; this is where the mystery is born. This genius is at work in pure art. Genius does not require pastiche or imitation, nor does it need to sell itself or do missionary work. Talent cannot be taught; it is a gift that can be exercised freely.
  
  This concept is more useful than terms like ‘innovative’ and ‘authentic’, which often provoke aversion. Because these terms are unclear. Here the lack of good and clear evaluation principles becomes evident. ‘Innovative’ and ‘authentic’ usually refer to style. The concept of ‘exemplary’ can apply within any style and genre. An important aspect of exemplarity is that the work is irreplaceable. This does not mean unique, because uniqueness says nothing about the artistic quality. Irreplaceable means that no other work can take its place. Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony cannot be ‘replaced’ by Ferdinand Riess’s, but the opposite can be true.

The three perspectives:

• Concept — This perspective concerns the artistic starting point of the work, or the basic idea. When the concept is unclear, the work will most likely fail. This does not mean that the concept must be immediately clear to the artist at the outset; often, clarity arises during the process of creation. However, at some point, that clarity will reveal itself, and only then can the work be completed. All the materials then ‘fall into place’, often requiring much to be discarded; not all material, no matter how beautiful on its own, will prove useful in fully expressing the concept. The concept determines the structure, form, and content of the work. These concepts, however, are not without their problems.
  
• Context — By ‘context’, we mean the relationships we perceive within the work at various levels: how different materials relate to each other and to the concept within the work, as well as outside it: how the work relates to other works (including the artist’s own œuvre), and how the work relates to the past, be it the period, style, or genre.
  
• Consistency — This perspective involves the optimal use of materials; both the relationship of the material to the concept and an awareness of the context. An important sub-principle is derived from the so-called ‘Occam’s Razor’ — paraphrased for artwork, it could be as follows: The number of different material forms should serve to best express the overarching concept of the work. In most cases, this means using the minimal number of distinguishable material forms possible. For example, a sonata form has two themes, which is the optimal number to express the dialectical concept of this form — namely, the juxtaposition of themes, their processing and development, and bringing them to synthesis. On the other hand, a fugue ideally has one theme. The overarching concept can be described with the term ‘optimal yield’: the fugue is about the optimal yield that can be obtained from this theme. One theme is then optimal. The opposite of the previous principles on the use of a minimum of material is also conceivable: not a minimum of material forms, but the use of as much different material as possible; this would mean that the overarching concept precisely wants to express this abundance. Consistency applies to both the perspective of the concept and the context.

For a good pure artistic judgement, it is important that the above conditions and perspectives are interconnected; they do not exist independently. However, they cannot be weighed against each other either; there is no overarching standard.

— Cornelis de Bondt, Loosduinen, Marche 18, 2024