As part of my French major, I’m taking a senior topics course on French New Wave cinema. Our class meets every Monday at 7PM to watch a 2-hour long (usually black and white) film from the 1950s; we read about 20-50 pages for our Wednesday class, where we discuss the film and its role in the development of French cinema and culture.
The first few weekends of the Spring semester, the Lyric hosts the annual French Film Festival. French students and faculty, Francophiles and film buffs spend their Saturday afternoons watching contemporary French and Francophone films. Two friends and I attended the showing of The Last Mistress, and on our way back to the dorm, discussed the film’s cinematography and its moral commentary on contemporary and 18th century society.
Which of the two is the better aesthetic experience?
In my last essay I argued that food and architecture were art because their authors strove to express an unnamed vision (Croce); I also argued that by being artifacts presented to an audience, they are therefore also open to criticism (Collingwood). Film, as a genre, can be argued for on similar terms; both New Wave and contemporary French cinema can also be defended as artifacts through the construction of a historical narrative that can be traced back to the development of photography as an artifact, or even further to Realist paintings, or back to Renaissance etchings (Carroll). In any case, what I’m concerned with is the opening of artifacts to criticism, that is, the judging of the aesthetic experience as good or bad.
If the audience is part of the Artworld and therefore allowed to criticize the aesthetic experience as good or bad, does this criticism extend to the artifact itself? That is, does having a good aesthetic experience mean the artifact itself is good artifact? Does the property of goodness only apply to an experience or only to the artifact? And to make things a bit more difficult, what role does will play in determining the value of an aesthetic experience (and how does this determination translate to the value of an artifact)?
One argument could be as follows: the value of an aesthetic experience only holds meaning for the individual experiencing the artifact, without extending a value judgment upon the artifact itself. For example, I may have hated every film we watched in class. As a member of the Artworld, I have the right to say I do not like such and such film. However, my judgment only reflects my personal aesthetic experience; since there are other students in the class that might have enjoyed the film, our individual judgments cannot truly reflect the value of the film itself, only the value of our aesthetic experiences. So, even a film critic writing for the New York Times cannot determine the value of a film as an artifact based on his aesthetic experience of the film, merely the value of his aesthetic experience of the film; there is something else that determines the film’s value as an artifact, but what is it?
Or, let’s say the value given to an aesthetic experience is transferable to the artifact. Then who gets to determine which aesthetic experience judgment is the right one to transfer? According to Gans, the film critic is a part of the higher taste public, so we (the lower taste public) allow him to deem the film as being good or bad, based solely on his aesthetic experience; we (the lower taste public) continue to make our own value judgments on our aesthetic experiences of the artifact, but in the end bow down to the higher public’s assessment. Can anyone gain access to the higher taste public? Should the higher taste public’s assessment be the only determinant for the value of an artifact? What happens when members of the higher taste public conflict in their value judgments?
As for will: I was obliged to watch films for class, but chose to attend the French Film Festival. I participated in the Artworld both in my watching the films, and in my discussing them with other members of the Artworld. If my needing to be in class influenced my dislike for the New Wave films, the first argument would be fine (the films themselves are not bad because I didn’t like them), but the second argument may falter (are the films really bad just because I [who as an artist am a member of Gans’ upper taste public] didn’t want to watch them and therefore didn’t enjoy them, or are they still good because the film critics say so?). Similarly, if I liked The Last Mistress, was it because I chose to be there, or because I truly enjoyed the experience? Can I say I enjoyed the aesthetic experience because I wanted to be there without contaminating a positive value judgment of the film itself?
I think Carroll’s idea of the historical narrative might offer some insight into solving this problem. The assumption is that an object presented as an candidate is an artifact by default; only the skeptics must prove otherwise. Similarly, let’s say that an artifact is also good, and must only be proven otherwise. Here’s where the aesthetic experience comes in: an artifact is good because it has been enjoyed (i.e. the aesthetic experience of the artifact is good). Only when one bad experience (analogous to the skeptic of the object as artifact) of the artifact arises, must we start to determine whether or not the artifact itself is good or bad. So, looking at the example of my French film class: once someone in my class does not enjoy the film (has a negative aesthetic experience), we (the class as members of the Artworld) must come to some consensus as to whether the individual’s experience is a reflection of the artifact’s quality or the individual’s willingness to experience the artifact. It does not matter that the critic of the higher taste public passed a positive value judgment on the film – we must use our collective aesthetic experience and an historical art-value narrative (that looks at the history of good art, as opposed to just art), to determine the artifact’s value. In the case of The Last Mistress, if my friends and I agreed that the aesthetic experience was a good one, and therefore the artifact is good, our desire to watch the film has no bearing; if one of us does not like the film, in spite of our wanting to watch it, only then must we (as an audience and therefore part of the Artworld) determine the quality of the artifact based on our individual aesthetic experiences and the historical art-value narrative.
