ABSTRACT

Artists make judgments about the additions and revisions that ought to be made during the process of creating a work; critics make judgments about the value of the finished work. Artistic practice is a communicative activity. Noticing this, theorists have often attempted to produce an Aristotelian, genus-and-species definition of art by seeking to identify the species of communicative activity that it consists in. The usual strategy has been to specify some particular kind of content that it is definitive of art to communicate—a copy of reality; an emotion or idea of the artist a relationship to an institution, a meaning, an aesthetic experience, distinctively artistic, means of communicating that content. The morally best way to relate to each other is by respecting each other as responsible, self-directing equals. A proper appreciation of the relationship between objectivity in art and morality requires attending to both the differences and the connections between them.