H2 Knowledge and Inquiry — Knowledge from Art (29/30)

Long Passage [RI Prelim 2023] The author’s main conclusion is that despite the capacity of art to evoke emotions and provoke thought, art cannot give us genuine knowledge. He first considers the two possible avenues for art to contribute to knowledge, namely via the interpretations of art experts and the eliciting of feelings and introspection, before concluding that neither avenue creates genuine knowledge — art experts are prone to bias, while feelings are unreliable bases for objective knowledge and can be elicited by propaganda. Ultimately, while the author correctly acknowledges the limited capacity of art to provide objective knowledge of the world given the inherent subjectivity of aesthetic judgements and responses, his argument is weakened by an overly narrow conception of what knowledge is — art can still give us tacit knowledge and introspective knowledge about our own beliefs and dispositions. The author first examines the capacity of art experts to provide knowledge from and about art, before identifying two challenges that preclude this possibility — aesthetic judgements made by experts are still prone to bias, and requiring experts to interpret art is an elitist conception of aesthetic knowledge. The first point of criticism is an astute one — indeed, our aesthetic judgements are influenced by not only personal biases and preferences, but also “prevailing trends” as the author notes. For instance, Peking Opera — with its bright and bold face masks worn by performers — might be considered traditionally beautiful by the Chinese, but Western audiences frequently regard the loud colours of the masks as grotesque and discordant, since these combinations of bright contrasting colours are rarely found in Western art. Hence, even an expert might be affected by their cultural upbringing when they make judgements about art and beauty, limiting the capacity of art to tell us objective knowledge of the aesthetic realm. Similarly, art experts are also beholden to the preferences of the art movements of their time — while experts in the Classical age valued paintings with fine brushstrokes and realistic colours, experts in the Impressionist era lauded the coarse brushstrokes and unblended colours of artists

like Monet. Thus, it is clear that experts are not able to offer a perfectly objective evaluation of artworks — it seems that the inevitable subjectivity of art limits its capacity to contribute to knowledge about aesthetic properties like beauty. The author’s second criticism — that requiring art experts for knowledge lends to elitism — is, however, a weak one. Not only is it justified merely via a rhetorical appeal to the supposedly ludicrous claim that an average Joe does not know what art is, it is also tense with his earlier observation that there is “inherent subjectivity” in aesthetic judgement — logically, if aesthetic judgements were really subjective for everyone, the implication is that neither experts nor the common man has knowl