Second Term

I turn now to the Aesthetic Argument’s second term, which states that the point of interpretation is to promote or aid the point of consuming art. We have at this point established that the point of consuming art is to have aesthetically satisfying experiences. We have also established something of a precedent for dealing with “. . . point of. . . ” claims, namely in terms of function. To say that interpretation has such-and-such a point is to say that this is its function—that this satisfies the needs and interests in the service of which we so aggregate the things that fall under the concept. Let us examine this premise, and see where it gets us in the hands of the value-maximizer.

Beardsley, in another one of his later essays (1982d), describes two models

of criticism. One is what he calls the “Consumers’ Union model of (professional)

criticism” (CU), and the other what he calls “the press agent (or PA) model of

criticism.” On the way to these models, which I will discuss in a moment,

he makes a crucial distinction: between “critic” as a role that any of us may assume and “critic” as a professional status. The latter applies to “one who makes criticism his occupation: one whose function is not merely to criticize but to help others make their criticisms” (149). In this stricter sense, critics are “those who set themselves up, or are set up by others, to make public judgments for

the purpose of guiding the choices of others who are less qualified than they, perhaps by the lack of talent or time.”

I propose to adopt this stricter definition as a paradigm, with the under- standing that it is meant not quite to exclude those who have not so made criticism their “occupation” but to render their activity explanatorily secondary

(in the present context). My claim is that, to understand thefunctionof criticism

(and by extension of interpretation), we must look to people who have made criticism their occupation, or at least to this occupation itself, which most clearly enshrines those of our needs and interests in the service of which we have a concept of criticism in the first place.

I imagine that Beardsley had something like this in mind, for he reasons from what he calls the “normative authority” implicit in this stricter definition to

his CU model, on which, in the manner of “the specialist inConsumer Reports,”

“the critic’s primary obligation is to the consumer of art—the audience, the viewer, the reader, the listener. His service is a public service; he tells us, as best he can, what we need to know to make intelligent choices about works of art” (150). The PA model is an alternative on which “the critic’s primary obligation is not to the consumer, but to the producer—that is, to the artist and, indirectly, to the art itself as a form of enterprise involving many artists, present and future. The critic is the handmaiden of the work, preparing the way for it” (155). These views seem roughly to correspond to the value-maximizer and the intentionalist, respectively. The former takes the primary function of criticism to involve guiding consumers to aesthetic satisfaction, while the latter takes this obligation to involve revealing the “communicative act” in which the artist was engaged.

As I see it, the first, CU model has to be correct as a basic account of the function of criticism. Although interpretations have many benefits, among which are benefits to the artist and, as Beardsley says, “indirectly” to the art itself, these strike me as contingencies rather than as functional necessities, responsive more to how criticism must accommodate itself in the culture than to those of our needs and interests in the service of which the concept arose in the first place. Beardsley therefore is quite right to reach the CU model from his prefatory remarks about the paradigm of the professional critic (“whose

The Aims of Interpretation 95 function is not merely to criticize but to help others [viz. consumers] make their criticisms”).

It might be felt that this is not quite to reach, yet, the desired claim that

interpretation is an adjunct to artisticconsumption. All we have said is that it is a

function of criticism to help consumers make theircriticisms, while we needed

to have said something about enhancing the consumer’sexperience. This may,

however, already be entailed by Beardsley’s remarks, for he does not mean that the critic’s job is to help the consumer become more like her, a good critic (although this might happen, too). It is rather to help the consumer “make intelligent choices about works of art.” To make an intelligent choice is, in large part, to have some idea of the sort of experience a given work will provide and to decide whether or not one wishes to have that sort of experience. To get better at knowing which works will so aesthetically satisfy, such that one chooses to experience more of them, is to enhance one’s overall aesthetic satisfaction in one’s engagement with art. This, of course, is in addition to the

fact that criticism will (ideally) help us get the most out of the works wedo

choose to experience. The function of criticism may thus be seen to be parasitic on the function of art, for what critics are in the business of doing is enabling

art to better fulfillitsfunction (of aesthetically satisfying).

Such at least is one way of putting the point, which we have reached on the basis of what we have taken the function of art to be. For it is only because the function of art is to afford certain sorts of experience that the function of criticism is connected to the facilitation of such experience—by, in part, enabling consumers to make “intelligent choices.” Otherwise, if the function of art were something else, what counts as an “intelligent choice” would also be something else. For instance, if the function of art were to communicate the intentions of artists, then intelligent choices for the consumer would involve seeking out not the most aesthetically satisfying but the most “communicative” works—those which best communicate what their artists intended. This seems less plausible as an account of what audiences do (and what critics help them do), which itself is further proof of the value-maximizer’s conception of the function of art.

interpretation—beyond what it shares with criticism as to its function—in order to reach the conclusion of the Aesthetic Argument. Granted, the function of

criticism isa fortiori the function of interpretation (given that interpretation is a

component of criticism). Buthowdoes the function of interpretation parasitize

upon the function of art? How, that is, does interpretation enable art to better fulfill its function of aesthetically satisfying (or help consumers “make intelligent choices about works of art”)? To answer this, we have to say something about the sort of thing an interpretation is.