Sage Journals: Discover world-class research

Abstract

The standards by which art is evaluated may be universal (agreed to by judges with different or no backgrounds in art) or relative (dependent on who is doing the judging). The issue of universalism/relativism was reviewed, along with the related issue of what criteria are used to judge art. Both scholarly and scientific resources were summarized. To test for the influence of different occupational roles on judgments about art, a survey was conducted among fourteen academics and seventeen business people in the arts. They rated, on mailed questionnaires, the importance of twenty criteria for judging art. Similarities between the two groups' ratings and among the criteria were the rule. Interviews supported these results. The criteria, though, differed in the magnitude of their importance. The consistency with which aesthetic criteria were judged favored the universal position.

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Assunto

, Criticism: The Middle Ages; From the Renaissance to Modern Times, Encyclopedia of World Art, Vol. IV, McGraw-Hill, New York, pp. 122–140, 1961.

Best

, The Objectivity of Artistic Appreciation, British Journal of Aesthetics, 20, pp. 115–127, 1980.

Hospers

, Understanding the Arts, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1962.

Rosenberg

, Art on the Edge, Macmillan, New York, 1975.

Richards

I. A.

Ogden

C. K.

, and Wood

, The Foundations of Aesthetics, Haskell House, New York, 1971.

Gombrich

E. H.

, Art and Illusion, 2nd edition, Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 1969.

Reitlinger

, The Economics of Taste, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York, 1963.

Rosenberg

, On Quality in Art: Criteria of Excellence, Past and Present, National Gallery of Art/Princeton University Press, Washington, D.C., 1967.

English

J. W.

, Criticizing the Critics, Hastings House, New York, 1979.

10.

Child

I. L.

, Humanistic Psychology and the Research Tradition, Wiley, New York, pp. 60–68, 1973.

11.

Gotz

Borisy

Lynn

, and Eysenck

, A New Visual Aesthetic Sensitivity Test: I. Construction and Psychometric Properties, Perceptual and Motor Skills, 49, pp. 795–802, 1979.

12.

Meier

N. C.

, Art in Human Affairs, McGraw-Hill, New York, pp. 58–60, 1942.

13.

Cahadan

, The Consistency of Aesthetic Judgment, Psychological Monographs, 51:5, Whole No. 231, pp. 75–87, 1939.

14.

Kreitler

and Kreitler

, Artistic Value Judgments and the Value of Judging Art, Leonardo, 16, pp. 208–211, 1983.

15.

Winner

, Invented Worlds: The Psychology of the Arts, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, pp. 66–77, 1982.

16.

Arnheim

, Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye, University of California, Berkeley, 1966.

The Criteria Used to Judge Art: Marketplace and Academic Comparisons

Abstract

Get full access to this article

References