ABSTRACT
Eitner leaves us with this difficulty, though: neither he nor anybody else has yet been able to propose a formulation that would successfully capture what he or she means by quality (Dickie 1989). Acknowledging this, Eitner’s long-time Stanford colleague Albert Elsen has suggested that, in its verbally elusive but nonetheless (to him) palpable reality, ‘quality’ might well be likened to obscenity in that – as Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart observed about the latter – without being able to define it he would still know it when he saw it. Lest this might tempt one to think, however, that quality might be instantly perceptible, Elsen also suggested – the point is one on which a good number of other commentators agree – that quality must be determined over time. A work of art of quality is one, he said, with ‘aesthetic durability’, one that does not wear out ‘its intellectual and emotional welcome’ (Elson 1990: 9). In a similar vein, Meyer Shapiro noted that ‘the best in art can hardly be discerned through rules; it must be discovered in a sustained experience of serious looking and judging’ (Shapiro 1978: 232).
