Against the Moral Appraisal of Interrogative Artworks: Wayne Booth and the Case of Huck Finn

Abstract

Notes and FragmentsMorality aNd art: tHE CaSE oF HUCK FiNN by donovan Miyasaki i n the following essay, i argue that in the case of some works of art, moral evaluation should not play a role in artistic appraisal. While i will reject the strong ethicist's view-the view that moral evaluation may inform the artistic evaluation of any artwork-i will not do so in favor of the aestheticist's position. the aestheticist argues for a rigid distinction between the moral and aesthetic evaluation of an artwork. on this view, the moral status of the work is independent of and irrelevant to artistic value. this view would allow us, for example, to evaluate leni reifenstahl's film The Triumph of the Will as a superior work of cinematic art, while at the same time condemning it on moral grounds. 1 rather than support a strict separation of aesthetic and moral elements in an artwork, i will suggest that in the case of certain types of artwork, it is inappropriate to use moral criteria in their artistic evaluation-even though the work's moral content contributes to its artistic value. this is the case in artworks that (1) are "interrogative" in form and (2) have moral dilemmas as their principal theme.Briefly put, an interrogative artwork is one that poses a question or problem that remains unresolved in the work. i will begin by explaining in more detail what i mean by an interrogative artwork. Using the example of duchamp's "ready-made" sculpture Fountain, i will argue that it is inappropriate to artistically evaluate such works by appeal to criteria that they themselves call into question. i will then turn to the specific issue of morally interrogative artworks. i will consider Mark

Supervision and Contributing to the Analytic Culture

“…In this project, the critic endeavours to formulate the artist's vision of the separate forms constituting the art object, the scene these forms create, the artist's worldview (Rose, 2019), and implicit questions about art and life within the specific culture from which the artwork emerged (Miyasaki, 2007). Every artwork has an 'aboutness' because it is 'an expressive object made by a person and it is always about something' (Barrett, 1994, p. 71) and therefore contains specific meanings, concepts, and ideas (Tam, 2018).…”