By reexamining Michaud’s notion of the pluralism of artistic practices and values, I have attempted to reconstruct the aesthetic rationality that manifests itself through specific arguments about the qualities of works of art. It is about the analysis and the union of language games in the Wittgensteinian sense that allows us to account for our evaluation statements. In order not to adopt a strictly relativistic attitude, we must exercise the search for resemblance of aesthetic values within different language games. Judging contemporary art therefore consists in discerning these local values and organizing them conceptually by scales of appreciation, bringing to unity all the diversity of aesthetic experiences. This position is genuinely objectivist because aesthetic value is conceived as a quality that causes a similar experience of evaluation in all human beings according to the same scale of appreciation.
We have seen that contemporary art is made up of innumerable language games that can be extended, enriched and complicated. This is why it is difficult in judging taste for some who do not have the words and do not know how to play the game. Learning the use of language within each field of contemporary art plays a fundamental role in judgment of taste. Here, I totally subscribe to the idea of a form of rationality in the aesthetic judgment based on art that Lichtenstein defends in his book The rules of art (1). It is necessary to rely on aesthetic rationality which admits the justification of judgments by argumentation, namely the reasons of art. It is at this point that reference must be made to the role of artistic experience in the enrichment, development and elaboration of aesthetic judgement. Lichtenstein indeed shows that one must practice art in order to see well (2). It is necessary to have a concrete and material relationship to exercise the eye. In this sense, Lichtenstein takes up this idea of amateur art practice of the 18th century, where one learned to paint, to draw, to make watercolors. She exposes the arguments of Du Bos and Caylus to understand the thought of the ignorant spectator who illustrates this relationship between theory and practice. It is a praise of the amateur who has experience of art, but who is not biased like the artist or the collector. The ignorant can see or hear certain things that the artist cannot. It is possible that knowing too much makes one unavailable on what the aesthetic experience would have allowed for immediacy and surprise. What is particularly at stake is the learning of the affects of aesthetic experience and its comparisons. However, knowledge of an intellectual order contributes to forming our taste by refining its delicacy. Lichtenstein’s conception therefore seems to me truly a theory of the “connoisseur” in the Humean sense, which I obviously approve of. In Hume’s normed taste experience, concentration, comparison, attention, lack of bias, and consideration of all components of the object from various angles form the sharpness of perception (3). In Hume, there is room for a practice of taste education, since he admits knowledge in the judgment of taste. This leads to say that the aesthetic appreciation of the amateur of Lichtenstein refers to that of the expert of Hume. In this, the judgment of taste is neither immediate nor easy, and requires a finesse of discernment.
Faced with our disarray in judging works of contemporary art, aesthetic rationalization must be armed with philosophical discourse by constructing the central concepts of an aesthetic logic. This is the rational discourse that defines the aesthetic and non-aesthetic qualities of the work. In this context, I have devoted the last three chapters of my project to works made from chance, to the ready-made and to the installations of immersion which pose the problem of the correspondence between aesthetic experience and artistic qualities of the object. On the technical side, we can judge a work of Bacon by a manipulation of chance by the artist. On the same scale of appreciation belong all the works that are characterized by a relationship between the artistic choice and the random act. This discourse consists of arguing that a work of art can have value in its history of creation and the artistic process. Another analysis unfolds regarding the constitutive quality of the ready-made. Here, I maintain that the aesthetic value of the ready-made can reside in the concept of a work. There is a need to think of the concept of a work of art as a non-aesthetic feature on which we can make our judgment of taste. This means that it is possible to group the various works under the same scale of appreciation of the idea of a work. Finally, the aesthetic experience of the installations of immersion refers to the discernment of hyper-aesthetic events that decondition the viewer’s sensory habits. It is the experience characterized by a testimony of a new perceptual paradigm. By detaching the view from a context, an immersive work is therefore based on a tiny difference in perception that cannot be measured in terms of the descriptive qualities of the object. This is a fundamental aspect of the immersive concept that brings together the strange and frustrating devices by renewing our aesthetic experience.
At the last level, aesthetic rationalization depends on the institutional and political context of contemporary art. We discover a set of structural limitations of museums and art galleries that often escape the description of the non-physical qualities of art objects such as the creative process, the conceptual idea or the transgression of artistic rules. The contemporary era tries to institutionalize the revolt without explaining what this revolt consists of. It does not attempt to educate the viewer in front of a work. One of the examples is that of Jeff Koons’ exhibition at the Center Pompidou where the plates describing the concept are dissociated from the works in most cases (4). We look at a painting in one corner, then we read the description of the concept in the other. In addition, we briefly discover the screen showing us the video about the process of the production of the works of the artist only when, on leaving the exhibition, we cross the shop with the products of Koons. This retrospective, like many other exhibitions of contemporary art, thus claims that the art object is the only main aspect of the aesthetic experience and the rest is unimportant. In this case, the art lover does not have complete access to aesthetic argumentation without bearing on all the physical and non-physical components of a work of art. It is the complex, multifaceted perception of a work that serves to differentiate one art object from another. Such, then, would be a rational requirement that everyone could invoke in favor of their evaluations and their particular tastes.

References:

(1) Lichtenstein tries to rethink the aesthetics of today deprived of its object and artistic content. She is interested in reconciling philosophical reflection with knowledge of art on the condition of breaking with this autonomy of theory in relation to the world of practical experience. See J. LICHTENSTEIN, Les Raisons de l’art, Essai sur les théories de la peinture, Gallimard, 2014.
(2) Ibid. p.94-110.
(3) D. HUME, Essai sur l’art et le goût, op. cit., p. 75-124.
(4) The exhibition at the Pompidou Center from 26th of November 2014 to 27th of April 2015.