Conclusion

This chapter summarizes the book’s central claims and looks at paths for future work on the applied ethics of artistic creation and ethical criticism. It suggests the need for two parallel strands of inquiry: On the one hand, as the term “applied ethics” suggests, there is a need for a finer-grained understanding of both the artistic and ethical contexts of artistic creation—an understanding that will need to be informed by research across a number of fields, including anthropology, art history, and moral psychology. On the other hand, whatever details of that context are revealed by this fine-grained analysis, there will be a more abstract conceptual challenge about how to reconcile the norms of that art-historical and ethical context with those in currency in the art-historical and ethical context from which one is judging the work. So, the parallel path of inquiry is in metaethics.

Performing Arts

In a discussion of three kinds of performing art—performance art, music, and theatre—this chapter explores three topics: (1) The performer’s moral responsibility to her- or himself. When this topic is broached in the criticism of an artwork, it is often because a performer has done something that raises the question of whether he or she should treat him- or herself in that way—often, but not always, in a way that involves bodily harm. (2) The ethical dimension of the relationship between performers. In cases of collaboration, the creation of such performances necessarily involves an interpersonal dynamic, which, in turn, has an essential ethical dimension. It also considers the additional complication of performances in which audience members contribute to the performance in a sufficiently robust way as to be regarded as co-performers or co-creators. (3) The ethical dimension established by the relationship between the performer(s) and the (non-interactive) audience, rather than performers and other performers.

Philosophical Aesthetics and the Ethical Criticism of Art

This chapter critically reviews an approach to the ethical criticism of art that has dominated attention in philosophical aesthetics. The author calls it the “interpretation-oriented approach” and “perspectivism.” On this approach, art is ethically evaluated in terms of its meanings—in particular, in terms of the attitudes or perspectives the work embodies, endorses, expresses, or prescribes. The author raises two central objections to perspectivism: it does not carry much force in the real world (i.e., it tends not to result in criminal or civil liability, fines, censorship, and so forth), and it depends upon the contentious task of interpreting the work.

Animals in Contemporary Art

With reference to a number of contemporary cases, such as that surrounding the Guggenheim’s Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World exhibition, this chapter argues that some important controversies about the ethics of art can be explained in terms of a disconnect between people who tacitly adopt the perspectivist (or another interpretation-oriented) approach to ethical criticism and people who tacitly adopt a production-oriented approach to ethical criticism. The chapter argues that perspectivism tends to be favored not only in philosophical aesthetics, but also in art criticism and in many art world institutions. In contrast, non-specialists tend to tacitly adopt the production-oriented approach. In the case of the use of animals in contemporary art, current controversies are further explained by the fact that, given some fairly uncontroversial premises about the moral respect that we owe to non-human animals, people who evaluate such work from a production-oriented approach are likely to find much that is prima facie ethically blameworthy. Moreover, they are rationally warranted in doing so.

The Production-Oriented Approach to the Ethical Criticism of Art

This chapter sketches the general argument for the production-oriented approach to the ethical criticism of art. It begins by noting that at least some artworks (of performance art, for example) are isomorphic with the actions by which they are created. Such artworks are open to ethical evaluation in the same way that any action of a moral agent is open to ethical appraisal. This clears the conceptual space for the production-oriented approach. The chapter goes on to show that the production-oriented approach has an advantage over the interpretation-oriented approaches advocated by Booth, Devereaux, and Gaut in virtue of its ability to assign praise or blame to real moral agents who are responsible for their artworks. The chapter then bolsters the rationale for the production-oriented approach by appealing to anti-empiricist arguments in the aesthetics literature before drawing upon an analogy to similar arguments in virtue ethics and virtue epistemology.

Introduction

This chapter summarizes the methods, arguments, and contents of the overall book. It outlines the central considerations in support of the production-oriented approach to the ethical criticism of art. It claims that judgments of an artwork’s ethical value are often made (and often should be made) in terms of how it was created and, furthermore, that this is in part because some art forms more readily lend themselves to this form of ethical appraisal. In addition, the chapter claims that among the ways in which we ethically criticize art, this production-oriented approach more often leads to practical consequences (censure, dismissal, prosecution, legislation) because its claim to objectivity is less contested than that of other sorts of ethical criticism.

Stand-up Comedy

This chapter explores the ethics of stand-up comedy with a particular focus on the warrant of ethical criticism of this art form. The chapter argues for the need to understand stand-up comedy as a performance and offers an account of the additional ethical leeway one tends to grant to stand-up comedians. The chapter zeroes in on the relevance of the comedian’s persona and moral character as ethically relevant features of the context of creation. It discusses two notable cases including the censure of Louis C.K. in the wake of his admission of sexual misconduct and the sustained criticism of Dave Chappelle for making jokes about transgender people.

Environmental Art and the Interaction of Ethical and Aesthetic Value

This chapter argues that (1) in contrast to the art forms already discussed, the ethical criticism of which sometimes invites the perspectivist approach and sometimes demands the production-oriented approach, the proper ethical criticism of environmental art requires the production-oriented approach; (2) the production-oriented approach to the ethical criticism of environmental artworks lends support to the moderate moralist’s claim about the interaction of ethical and aesthetic value: the presences of ethical defects in environmental artworks sometimes diminishes their aesthetic value; (3) because environmental artworks appropriate part of the natural environment as an aspect of their identity, an aesthetic flaw in an environmental artwork necessarily also creates aesthetic disvalue in the natural environment—disvalue that exists in virtue of the creation of the artwork. Insofar as the diminishment of the aesthetic value of the natural environment is ethically wrong, the aesthetic flaws of an environmental artwork necessarily constitute ethical flaws.

On Separating the Art and the Artist

This chapter works through a number of cases featuring well-known musicians and painters—Michael Jackson, Miles Davis, Gord Downie, Richard Wagner, Paul Gauguin, Graham Ovenden, and Jackson Pollock—to try to answer the question about when and how artists’ moral character ought to bear upon the ethical and artistic appraisal of their work. The chapter rejects the empiricist view that some aspect of the artist’s character must be manifest in the work, arguing, instead, on the basis of an analogy with virtue ethics, that the ethical status of the artist’s motivation in creating the work is relevant to an appraisal of it.

Photography

This chapter uses photography to advance the argument that the medium of an art form partly determines the sorts of features that are relevant to an ethical evaluation of an artwork within it. The chapter outlines current debates about medium-specificity and endorses a moderate view regarding the nature of medium-specific features and the plausibility of medium-specific claims. Building upon this discussion, this chapter proceeds to show that perspectivism accounts for some but not all of the ethically relevant features of photographs. In some cases, the most ethically pressing questions about photographs can only be addressed by the production-oriented approach to the ethical criticism of art.