Prof Paisley Livingston, Chair Professor and Head of the Department of Philosophy at Lingnan University.  In his inaugural lecture today, Prof Paisley Livingston, Chair Professor and Head of the Department of Philosophy at Lingnan University, outlined a contemporary philosopher’s perspective on the value of art and the nature of art appreciation. His main focus was on the important role played by complex background knowledge in the appreciation of artistic artefacts. He also underscored the place of skill or artistry amongst the various sorts of value that works of art can have.

Prof Livingston illustrated and explained his points by referring to a wide range of examples from the visual arts. His perspective on artistic value has implications for art education and for the sustaining of a viable artistic culture in Hong Kong and elsewhere.

Some people think that while works of art may have economic and sentimental value, there is no such thing as a specifically artistic kind of value. Prof Livingston challenged this idea by identifying a number of distinct kinds of artistic value that people can appreciate if they are given the right sorts of background information and orientation.

“Great works of art,” Prof Livingston argued, “can be good in a wide variety of ways. There is no one recipe for artistic value. While philosophers once thought that all good art should embody beauty and a few other aesthetic qualities, a plurality of artistic and aesthetic qualities and functions is now recognised. Yet if a work is to have any kind of artistic merit at all, some of its valuable features must be the result of the artist’s skilful realisation of intended qualities.”

Prof Livingston discussed cases of artistic serendipity in which the artist tries to bring about one kind of effect but unintentionally ends up with some very different and even better, result. Such things happen, yet a more central kind of artistic value that people tend to look for and prize depends on the exercise of skill. Some stylistic features are only good if they have been achieved on purpose, and when they are merely accidental, they even count as flaws.

Prof Livingston presented reasons for believing that art appreciation is not just a matter of a simple perception of the artistic artefact accompanied by either pleasure or displeasure, liking or disliking. To appreciate a work and unlock the values it may or may not offer, we have to first know what the artist was trying to do. More generally, we need to understand key features of the artist’s project and context. With reference to Renaissance, Chinese, early 20th-century and contemporary works, Prof Livingston showed different ways in which the understanding and appreciation of art requires this kind of contextual knowledge. When people are not given the right background information, it is not surprising that they stare at works without comprehension and fail to see the interest of the artefact. As Prof Livingston showed with examples from Renaissance art, this isn’t just true of difficult, contemporary avant-garde works, but also of great paintings housed in the world’s best museums. Uptake of the artist’s intentions and situation requires the kind of background that scholars, curators, and critics can provide to the public in their role as mediators between artists and their audiences.


About Prof Livingston

Prof Livingston is Chair Professor and Head of Philosophy at Lingnan University. He studied philosophy at Stanford University and received his PhD from The Johns Hopkins University. He has held teaching or research appointments at universities around the world, including The University of Michigan, McGill University, The University of Copenhagen and Siegen University (Germany). Prof Livingston has published various books and papers on aesthetics and the philosophy of the arts, including Art and Intention: A Philosophical Study (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005) and Cinema, Philosophy, Bergman: On Film as Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).