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If an art is a capacity or a skill, its value is realized when that skill is applied in some action. Sometimes this results in the production of an artifact having a range of valued functions serving a plurality of ends. The value of an art is generally equated with the value of the performances or artifacts it yields, which in many cases are referred to as “works” (but in other cases as “products,” “performances,” “displays,” “operations,” etc.). For example, various arts of motion pictures and other technologies must be employed to produce a device (for example, a DVD or a digital file) that can be used to generate multiple instances of a type of audio-visual display. The value of the art of motion pictures resides primarily, but not exclusively in the uses to which such displays are put. I write “primarily, but not exclusively” because value and “disvalue” may also inhere in the processes or actions involved in the genesis of an audio-visual display. Value and disvalue also pertain to various aspects of cinema understood, not only as a collection of audio-visual displays or cinematic works, but also as a complex constellation of social institutions, activities, and events On the topic of the values of the artworld as a systemic whole, see (Feagin 1994), who conjectures that even works that taken individually may not seem to fulfill certain functions may contribute to the larger system’s fulfillment of those very functions.

When one asks about the value of a work of art, several distinct questions come to mind. It is one thing to ask what kinds of value a particular work, such as a given motion picture, has. It is something else to enquire into the exclusively artistic value that some work may have. I will first say a few things about the former question and then turn to the latter.

In answering the broad question about the values of a particular work or performance, one normally discovers that the work has many different kinds of value, such as financial, sentimental, expressive, therapeutic, hedonic, moral, political, religious, epistemic, and pedagogical values. Striking contrasts and tensions may emerge: an action or product that is very bad in relation to one kind of value may turn out to be highly valuable in other ways, including ones the artisan(s) neither intended nor anticipated. A very poorly made film may have great pedagogical value because it can be used to illustrate grave errors that filmmakers should avoid. If the mistakes are laughable, the film may also prove to be entertaining by virtue of its flaws, a fact which bestows yet another sort of value on the work. A film may have the virtue of being an authentic and skillful expression of the filmmaker’s pessimistic world view. It could by the same stroke be well suited to help others learn about such a perspective on life. Yet it could be depressing for some viewers, and for others, it could serve to encourage suicidal inclinations (as in the “Werther effect” investigated by sociologists). The wasteful way in which a film was made could have a negative impact on the environment. Some of the performers may be harmed during the shooting of the film, whereas others profit immensely from the experience, and so on. In many cases, it may be very hard, or even impossible, to find a single overarching value or norm in relation to which a work’s plurality of valences could be compared and summed up (for background on axiological pluralism vs. monism, see Stocker 1990; Heathwood 2015). I return to this topic at the end of the chapter.

I move on now to the question of exclusively artistic value, which asks whether there is some kind of value that is shared by all arts in their common capacity as or qua arts. Given the extremely broad conception of art introduced above, this question may be formulated as follows: what is the exclusive value of skilled making or doing as such? Armed with an answer to that question, one could focus on whether and how this essential artistic value is manifested in specific artistic performances or works. One could then ask about the relations, within a particular work, between its exclusively artistic merit(s) and demerits, and its other, non-artistic merits and demerits. Such relations are hard to identify in the absence of a sufficiently precise identification of the relata—a problem that plagues the literature on the relations between diverse values within a particular work or performance.

With the question of the value of qua art in mind, consider first a few historical sources. For a start, here is Dio Chrysostom’s (1st century CE) anecdote regarding the legendary Greek artist, Apelles:

So, then, Apelles knew not how to represent froth of a horse wearied in action. But as he was more and more perplexed, finally in a fit of desperation he hurled his sponge at the painting, striking it near the bit. But the sponge, containing as it did many colours, which when taken together resembled bloody froth, fitted its colour to the painting. And at the sight Apelles was delighted by what Fortune [Tyche] had accomplished in his moment of despair and finished his painting, not through his art, but through the aid of Fortune. (Dio Chrysostom 1951, 39, vol. 5, ch. 63:4; my italics)

This anecdote was also related by Sextus Empiricus (1st–2nd century CE) in his Outlines of Pyrrhonism:

They say he was painting a horse and wanted to represent in his picture the lather on the horse’s mouth; but he was so unsuccessful that he gave up, took the sponge on which he had been wiping off the colours from his brush, and flung it at the picture. And when it hit the picture, it produced a representation. of the horse’s lather. (Sextus Empiricus 2000, 10–11)

In both versions of the story, the purely fortuitous realization of a desired mimetic effect is contrasted to an attempted manifestation of artistic virtuosity. Whereas Apelles is said to have been delighted with the lucky outcome, he could hardly pride himself on having met the artistic challenge he had taken up. The lucky effect had some kind of value for the artist, but it lacked another kind of value, namely, the value that a successful artistic feat would have had.

Pliny the Elder (1st century CE) relates a similar story in which the frustrated but lucky artist is named “Protogenes.” Pliny adds another character to the story:

Finally he [Protogenes] fell into a rage with his art because it was perceptible, and dashed a sponge against the place in the picture that offended him, and the sponge restored the colours he had removed, in a way that his anxiety had wished them to appear, and chance produced the effect of nature in the picture!

It is said that Nealces also following this example of his achieved a similar success in representing a horse’s foam by dashing a sponge on the picture in a similar manner, in a representation of a man clucking in his cheek to soothe a horse he was holding. Thus, did Protogenes indicate the possibilities of a stroke of luck also. (Pliny the Elder 1951, 338–339)

It is hard to know how to read Pliny’s remark regarding Nealces’ achievement. Imitating Protogenes’ lucky stroke by intentionally throwing the sponge at an incomplete picture is quite different from spontaneously casting the sponge in frustration. Nealces has not gotten as far as Jackson Pollock, but there is still an element of skill in his attempt at artistically beneficial sponge casting—an element that was lacking in Protogenes’ gesture.

This locus classicus was revisited by James Harris in the essay on art in his Three Treatises:

You have heard, said he, without doubt, of that Painter famed in Story, who being to paint the Foam of a Horse, and not succeeding to his Mind, threw at the Picture in Resentment a Sponge bedaubed with Colours, and produced a Foam the most natural imaginable. Now, what say you to this Fact? Shall we pronounce Art to have been the Cause? (Harris 1744, 6–7)

Harris responds to his rhetorical question in the negative. Art, he contends, requires not only a causal relation, but “intention, reason, volition, and consciousness” (Harris 1744, 7); the definition of “art” that he wishes to defend is “an habitual power in man of becoming the cause of some effect, according to a system of various and well-approved precepts” (Harris 1774, 17).

The “Painter famed in Story” was later alluded to by Bernard Bolzano in his elucidation of a concept of fine art in Über die Eintheilung der Schönen Künste [On the classification of the fine arts]:

A causal link between the beauties of the work and the producer’s act is insufficient; the artist has to have foreseen them and arranged his action with the intention of realising them. People will recognize it not as art but as chance when the artist realizes a beautiful depiction of the horse’s foam by throwing the sponge at the canvas […] We attribute to someone possession of a beautiful art or, what amounts to the same, the name artist, when that person has the ability through his free and intentional activity to produce objects that depend with certainty on the concept of beauty, such that their beautiful qualities are the direct consequence of a process of production arranged to bring about this anticipated end in this and no other way. (Bolzano 1849, 5, § 2, my trans., Bolzano’s italics)

Both Harris and Bolzano may plausibly be interpreted as saying that at least one kind of specifically artistic value requires the intentional realization of an intended result, where this feat is achieved in the intended manner. It is not obvious that either Harris or Bolzano would have ruled that recourse to chance could never make a positive contribution as part of the process of artistic production. They can, however, be read as advancing the thesis that the skillful and intentional achievement of an intended result is a necessary condition on the realisation of specifically artistic value. Yet there remains the question of whether the realization of a skillful achievement is also a sufficient condition on the realization of an instance of artistic value. If that proved to be the case, then we could identify the successful application of skill as at least a first kind of essentially artistic value property, common to all of the arts.

There are, however, reasons why it could be erroneous to draw that conclusion. In this regard Aristotle is again a helpful and influential source. On one reading, his response to the question about the value of art as such is that skilled making or doing finds its actual value only in the value of what is made or done, or in other words, in the ends served by the art. For example, the various medical arts, such as radiology and surgery, serve the goals of maintaining and restoring health in various ways, which is valuable because health is necessary to our well-being or flourishing. Flourishing is not something that is sought or achieved for the sake of something else; it is intrinsically valuable, and widely and uncontroversially recognized as such. Other things are done for the sake of flourishing, and these things have actual value as a result of their contribution to flourishing’s non-instrumental or “final” value. Aristotle famously contends that if everything were done solely in order to achieve something else, in an endless series that never connected to something that is good in a non-instrumental way, all of our desires would be “fruitless and vain” (Aristotle 2004, 4, 1094a). He also appears to have held that even the most effective and skillful activities are valueless if they serve only worthless ends. If that is right, the activation of skill in an intentional, instrumentally successful action is necessary, but not sufficient to there being actual artistic value.

Aristotle could, of course, have been wrong about this. We can test the Aristotle-inspired answer to our question by asking ourselves whether we can imagine a skill the activation of which would be valuable entirely or uniquely for its own sake. The Aristotelian challenge, then, is to take an exceptional skill and eliminate all of the external payoffs, and then see what worth remains. Can there be a skill that would actually be valuable without making any contribution whatsoever to something that has final value? In answering that question, we must note that the exercise of a skill that would be a final and not an instrumental value could not have value only because it pleased some onlooker; nor could the possession of this skill be valued because the thought that one has it is itself gratifying or rewarding. These would be instrumental values, so not what Aristotle’s challenge requires. By my lights, the challenge cannot be met because the search for a skill valued exclusively for its own sake comes up empty handed. Skill is nothing more than the ability to perform some task, or range of related tasks, well. Detached from its good or bad consequences, uses, or functions, skill as such is evaluatively neutral. Skill applied to the realization of good ends is valued for the excellence of that contribution, just as skill manifested in pursuit of evil ends is hated for its deleterious effects. If we prize and admire displays of exceptional skill spontaneously and “as such,” or in other words, seemingly for their own sakes, the actual, underlying springs of value have to do with the positive, non-instrumental value of our response, as was suggested above with reference to an intrinsically enjoyable experience occasioned by a display of skill. Displays of skill, for the performers and observers alike, are generally motivated and rewarded by positive social emotions valued intrinsically by those who enjoy them. In sum, if Aristotle is right, as would seem to be the case, the chain of “in order to’s” must terminate in ends that are valued in a non-instrumental manner. Exclusively artistic value—the value of applied virtuosity or skill—is instrumental, and thus dependent on the worth of the ends it serves.

These remarks are clearly applicable to the art of motion pictures. The thought is that no amount of skillful manipulation of the diverse crafts of cinema, such as cinematography, production design, scriptwriting, montage, make-up, acting, special effects, etc., can bestow value on the filmmakers’ endeavours unless the ends pursued by the filmmakers themselves have genuine value. And arguably, to have genuine value, the artistry must ultimately be grounded in its contribution to some final value, such as human flourishing or well-being.