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Articles
Aesthetics and Absolutes
Ralph Blumenau criticizes critics of criticism.
The history of the arts is studded with examples of art critics looking silly to later generations because they derided the work of men whose greatness is today regarded as unquestionable. Beethoven was criticized for the discord that opens the last movement of the Choral Symphony; Whistler was accused by Ruskin of flinging a pot of paint in the face of the public; the Impressionists evoked the contempt of the academies and first exhibited in the proudly named Salon des Refuses; Van Gogh sold only two paintings in his life and died penniless; and, on the other hand, we now think the inter-war mocking of the Victorian art became merely modish. As a result of all these critics being discredited, there are those, even in the highest places of today’s art establishment, who dare not make or back an aesthetic judgment, who are prepared to give gallery space for even the craziest experiments for fear that a future generation might likewise hold them up to ridicule for having rejected a work of genius. It often seems that the art establishment has simply lost confidence in its capacity to judge, not only from fear, but for a number of philosophical reasons as well.
Clearly there are no longer (if indeed there ever were) commonly accepted aesthetic values even among educated people: cultural relativism accompanies religious and moral relativism.
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