Research on the normativity of aesthetic judgements in film criticism

ABSTRACT

Following methodological relativism, the paper reflects critically on objectivist theories of aesthetic judgement that derive its objectivity from the rules by which the judgement is made, or from ideal settings of the observer. Both theories share the assumption that the person delivering the reliable (objective) aesthetic judgement is an art critic. The critical reflection of both theories is based on pragmalinguistic analysis of film criticism, that is, on the reconstruction of the semantics and normativity of value judgements made by professional film critics.

KEYWORDS:

• Film criticism
• semantics
• language game theory

Barnett Newman, the abstract-expressionist painter, once remarked that aesthetics was for the artist as ornithology was for the birds. The theories of philosophical aesthetics, in his view, are useless for both those who create the works and those who try to understand them. They do not help to create more interesting or more beautiful works of art, nor do they help one to understand them better. This harsh statement about the impracticability of aesthetics is, however, unjust in some respects, because the task of modern aesthetics is definitely not to seek a recipe for the beauty of works of art or to determine which works are good, interesting or beautiful. Since the eighteenth century, philosophical aesthetics has been focused on clarifying the conditions by which something is or can be considered to be beautiful, good, or inspiring. Philosophical aestheticians do not try to determine which works of art are beautiful, but they do try to determine the conditions that are necessary and satisfactory for something to be declared beautiful, in a way that we can count on the judgement of the one who makes this declaration. In other words, the normative nature of philosophical aesthetics lies in determining the conditions that the aesthetic judgement must meet, in other words, the right aesthetic judgement through which we declare something beautiful, good, or inspiring. The usefulness of philosophical aesthetics, or aesthetic axiology, can therefore be measured according to the extent to which it can describe and reconstruct aesthetic reasoning in practice. If the theories of aesthetic judgement prove to be inadequate, we may draw two conclusions: either the actors making the “aesthetic” judgement fail or the aesthetic theory fails because it prescribes something that nobody accepts. The answer one chooses depends on the methodology of the research one finds convincing.

I adhere to what is known as methodological relativism, that is, the view that the task of aesthetic axiology is not to determine the parameters of the right aesthetic judgement, but to describe, classify and explain the different ways actors make aesthetic judgements, to point out the implications (advantages and disadvantages) of a particular way of aesthetic assessment. The question of which of these ways is right or better, or which means of assessment we should adhere to, must be answered by the actors themselves. This decision cannot be made for them by any aesthetic theory. Values cannot be detected by language analysis or deduced from empirical data; they can only be chosen or assigned to an object or action(Najder 1975).¹

In this paper, I test two theories of aesthetic judgement which have the same goal, but achieve it by different means. Their purpose is to justify or ensure the objectivity of the aesthetic judgement in the sense of its truth, that is, the correspondence between the aesthetic judgement and aesthetic facts. They differ according to what makes the aesthetic judgement objective. Whereas the first theory derives objectivity from the objectivity of the rules or criteria by which the judgement is made, the second theory derives objectivity from the ideal settings of the observer, such as the detachment (disinterestedness) of the speaker. Both theories, however, share the assumption that the person delivering the reliable (objective) aesthetic judgement is an art critic.

An example of the first approach is Noël Carroll’s theory of art criticism(Carroll 2008), which builds on Daniel Kaufman’s theory of aesthetic judgement by defending both the truthfulness of aesthetic judgement in the sense of its correspondence with aesthetic fact and the deductive model of aesthetic argumentation. The normative force of an aesthetic judgement, Carroll argues, always relies on a rule such as “If an object Y has a property X, it is of high aesthetic quality” in the argumentation of critics. The validity of the law consists in the objective purpose which the type of work under assessment serves and art experts agree on. The purpose of the work determines the criteria for assessing the value of the object, that is, the criteria by which it can be objectively decided whether the object fulfils its immanent purpose. The ingenuity of this theory lies in the fact that instead of specifying a generally valid purpose required of all high-quality works of art, it applies the validity of the purpose only to a limited set of artworks, mostly works of a particular genre. Though because of the vast heterogeneity of art trends, genres, styles and artistic intents it is impossible to agree on the purpose of art as such, Carroll and Kaufman believe that experts can agree on the purpose of a work in terms of genre or style. An artwork is good or bad depending on whether it can fulfil its purpose. Attributing aesthetic value to the object being judged does not depend on personal taste or emotional response; it is, rather, the result of comparing the quality of the work and the objective artistic purpose that the work serves and is an intersubjectively verifiable fact(Kaufman 2002, 2003).

David Hume represents the other approach, where the normativity of an aesthetic judgement is anchored in the ideal conditions of perception(Kant 2007).² These allow for the identification of a natural connection between the qualities of the object and the aesthetic response: “Some particular forms or qualities, from the original structure of the internal fabric, are calculated to please, and others to displease (…)”.(Hume 1998) The ideal observer, according to Hume, has perfect sensory perception and sufficient natural intelligence, is unbiased and, in terms of taste, capable of spotting the smallest differences and qualities, based on his or her experience and training in the appreciation of art.³

Methodology, research questions and sample

The aim of the research is to analyse the evaluation of art critics. Since evaluative acts of critics are usually of a linguistic nature, a suitable tool for researching them is language analysis. Evaluation is also bound to the pragmatic situation of the speaker. The meaning of words is hard or even impossible to understand without sufficient knowledge of the context of the communication and the intentions of the speaker: “In order to get clear about aesthetic words you have to describe ways of living. We think we have to talk about aesthetic judgements like ‘This is beautiful’, but we find that if we have to talk about aesthetic judgements we don’t find these words at all, but a word used something like a gesture, accompanying a complicated activity”.(Wittgenstein 1967) My research will therefore be pragmalinguistic, aiming at understanding the speech acts of the critics in the context of the language game they play. By the language game, I mean the rules governing the speaker while he or she is making a speech act, the intent he or she wants to achieve through speech, and the assumptions underlying his or her evaluation, and finally the condition he or she reacts to.

To achieve this goal, my pragmalinguistic analysis will focus on film criticism, in particular, on the reconstruction of the semantics and normativity of value judgements made by film critics. By the normative force of a value judgement, I mean the claim to its validity or correctness. I am interested in what critics say when they claim some movie is, for example, good or bad and what epistemic weight they attribute to their assessment. What semantics do value judgements have in film criticism? Are critics’ aesthetic judgements normative and if so, based on what in the context of a particular language game? On the objectivity of the rules or on the objectivity of the evaluator? Or is the normativity of critics’ judgement based on something else? What is the relationship between the evaluation and the emotional experience of critics? How do critics resolve disputes concerning aesthetic evaluation and why do they think they arise?

The technique of collecting data to answer these research questions was semi-structured interviews with a selected group of film critics whose selected reviews provided the default topics for the interviews (evaluative adjectives, value judgements, the film being assessed, and strategies of argumentation). Semi-structured interviews allowed for a better understanding of what meaning respondents attributed to the evaluative speech acts, how they understood the validity of their own assessments, and what intentions and assumptions influenced them.

The sample of respondents consisted of nine professional film critics, professional “cultural journalists” as they are called by Kristensen and From,(Kristensen and From 2015) who work for a print or internet periodical about the arts or run their own paid film review website.⁴ The interviews were conducted in 2018. The survey sample does not include intellectual critics with institutionalized cultural capital, that is to say, those who work at universities and publish in film studies journals. Excluded were also film fans, who publish their reviews for free on their own internet blogs or film databases (like the Česko-Slovenská filmová databáze—ČSFD) for free. The method selected for data analysis was the grounded theory, whose methodical steps—open and axial coding—led to a comprehensive reconstruction of the language game, its rules, preconditions, and consequences for the resolution of aesthetic disputes. They likewise helped—by means of selective coding—to identify its main purpose, the intent of the speaker(Strauss and Corbin 1990).⁵

Semantics of the art-lover language game

For the reconstruction of the film critics’ language game, I chose the following categories based on open coding of qualitative data: the speaker’s intent or the illocutionary function of the value judgement; the strategy for the value judgement justification; the language game preconditions; the relationship between the emotional reaction and the evaluation; and the source and the nature of the normative claim. A set of these criteria makes it possible to portray the whole of the language game played by film critics while reviewing films. It would, however, be inaccurate or unfair to say that film or art critics play only one language game. My goal is the reconstruction of the typical language game, the one that was played by the majority of respondents or was the dominant language game for all the respondents. That is not to say that I exclude the possibility that respondents may also play another language game or that other film critics play other language games in which the emphasis of evaluation is, for example, on knowledge of artistic intention, the difficulty of artistic performance, or the associative development of the positive impression that the film triggered in the reviewer, or even on predefined genre-quality criteria.

I call the dominant language game played by the respondents an “art-lover game”, using terminology adopted from Werner Strube(Strube 1981). By means of his or her value judgement, an art-lover informs others that he or she likes or dislikes a work of art, in this case a film. The terms “to like” and “to dislike” refer to a summary of all the art-lover’s value reactions accompanied by emotions with positive valence (“stunning”, “stimulating”, “thoughtful”) or negative (“flat”, “silly”, “kitschy”). The art-lover’s feelings of liking and disliking are triggered by his or her immediate experience, not by comparing the quality of the film against the quality benchmark and determining whether the film meets this standard.

The value judgement of a critic is neither a causally evoked reaction to a stimulus (a film watched) nor an auto-psychological statement resembling an answer to a psychiatrist’s asking how his or her patient is feeling. The evaluation of the art-lover relates not to their experiencing feelings of liking or disliking the artwork in question, but to the qualities of that work of art, that is, to the relation between the qualities of the work and one’s own experience: “Unless you are projecting your personal problems into the review, if you are truly writing about the movie based on your emotional reaction, it is about the movie, not you. The distinction is vague, granted, but you can tell when reading a text whether it opens the movie for you or whether you can see someone has a problem, and instead of the movie I am reading about the author” (Critic 8). The objective of the art-lover game is to communicate a critic’s personal opinion about the work in question and to describe the features of the work based on his or her experience. The immediate emotional impression is the starting point for a value judgement, not its denotation. With declaring the film was dull, the critics are not only saying they were bored while watching it; they are also saying the plot was predictable, the acting poor, and so forth. In other words, the predicates of personal taste become, in the language game of the art-lover, aesthetic concepts that are both evaluative and have descriptive content referring to the perceived qualities of the film(Young 2017).⁶ Emotions play a crucial role not only as the initial indicator of the high or the low quality of the film, but also help the critics to unveil the characteristics of the film: “I can be moved to tears by an edit sequence in a movie, which got me saying, ‘Wow, that’s awesome!’(Lyons 1980; Nussbaum 2001)⁷ At that moment I am not making an aesthetic judgement or [a judgement about] how perfectly made it is technically. Primarily it’s the emotion, stirred by the combination of different perspectives. Only when I tell myself, ‘Oh, I loved that’ do I begin to wonder why and go on to realize it was the superb editing, and I can analyse the editing” (Critic 4).

Controlling emotions

Along with being the key to understanding and appreciating the qualities of the film, emotions are also the key to understanding one’s own disposition to evaluate works in a particular way and are an important part of the evaluation of the work in the art-lover language game. A significant feature of the critic language game is the reflection of the relationship between one’s own experience and the qualities of the film:

Instead of axing my emotions when evaluating a film, I try to make them acutely conscious. [I try to] be aware of the fact that the film hit me also thanks to such ordinary factors as my favourite song or that the situation is something I’ve been through or that it has my favourite actress in it. These are all quite subjective factors that I naturally don’t want to axe. I try to be aware of them instead (Critic 6).

The attitude the critic has towards emotions corresponds with Edward Bullough’s concept of psychical distance as the elementary principle of aesthetic experience.(Bullough, 1912) An aesthetic experience of things surrounding one is conditioned, according to Bullough, by the distance between the observer and his or her practical “self”. This distance requires a reflective relationship to one’s own experience—namely, being aware of what affects one and how. The loss of distance, Bullough argues, is a flaw in aesthetic experience, caused mostly in professional critics, for example, by over-distancing, that is, watching a film while suppressing one’s emotions and concentrating instead on the technical aspects of the film (including camera work, editing, and similarities or dissimilarities with the book the film is based on).⁸ Equally wrong, according to Bullough, is under-distancing, that is, an unreflected immediate emotional reaction to a film.

Although the direct experience of the film is essential for the critic’s final judgement, critics often also subject that experience to reflection and ask some of the following questions. Which qualities of the film evoked the given experience in them and why? To what extent is the impression affected by the permanent disposition of the critic’s personality and to what extent is the judgement consistent with previous reviews? How does the film achieve its emotional effect? Emotions can be objectivized in various ways. Some respondents compare their reactions with the opposing views and reactions of film-goers which appear in the ČSFD and finalize their own position or reconsider their evaluation and opinion only while writing their own review. The respondents also compare their initial reactions with the opinions of other critics or with anticipated reactions of the readers of the medium they write for. This does not mean they would opportunistically make their opinion conform to those anticipated reactions. If their opinions differ from that of most critics or from the expectations of the editors and readers of the media, they are more cautious in their value judgements or carefully justify their stance. Some respondents watch a film more than once and compare the first and second impressions: “If you watch it one more time, you can compare it against the first impression, looking for balance” (Critic 8). Another way to objectivize emotions is to contextualize the film, that is, to find information about its development and production and its theme:

Simply the fact that you watch the movie and then revise your opinions by reading reviews, reading what the film-makers have said, you wonder whether some of the criticism makes sense at least to the extent that it does not get the facts wrong. I may, for example, expect the movie to have some kind of scenes, for example awesome car chases and then I find out the budget was too low, so I can’t expect a Danish action movie budgeted at five million [US dollars] to equal a Hollywood flick costing a hundred and fifty million (Critic 2).

Critics who objectivize their emotions explain purely evaluative or emotionally coloured terms by referring to qualities of the film or its impact as the consequence of a particular personality disposition: “If you have disposition X, the film will have the effect Y”:

For a long time I didn’t believe what an older female colleague of mine had told me, that I’d only understand this movie when I had kids myself. I insisted that the movie should be great regardless of whether you have kids or not. But you just can’t cut yourself off from your own experience. I have kids now and see certain things differently. I’m more sensitive to certain things. I know I can’t ignore it but I am aware of the fact. (…) And so I prepare my readers in my reviews, sometimes by saying it plainly: ‘If you fancy romcoms or if you have kids or if you are sensitive to this or that, either be careful, this movie is not for you, or, on the contrary, you’ll like it all the more’ (Critic 6).

The aim of reflection is to find out whether the connection between an emotional reaction to a work and the inherent qualities of that work is the reason for its positive or negative evaluation. As part of the objectification of emotions, respondents distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate personality factors that may affect the final value judgement. While a permanent disposition to evaluate works with certain qualities consistently shapes critics’ personal taste and is a legitimate factor influencing their evaluations, critics consider transient emotional states (a bad mood, fatigue, distraction, and so forth) to be illegitimate factors which should not be reflected in the evaluation. However, the criterion of dividing personality factors into legitimate and illegitimate ones does not correspond to the Kantian distinction between a generally shared experience or disposition on the one hand and an individual personal perspective or idiosyncratic factor on the other(Schellekens 2008). Rather, it is dependent on the persistence of the individual disposition. When tastes are shaped by a highly individual factor such as the experience of war or a melancholy temperament, the respondents consider this factor not only legitimate but also desirable in terms of evaluation, since it increases the critic’s sensitivity to the film and can greatly contribute to the originality and sophistication of the view of the critic. In evaluation, respondents therefore strive to disregard transient personality factors (like fatigue or annoyance) which distract them from the film being assessed and interfere with the consistency of their assessment, with the integrity of their personal taste, which their readers recognize them by and see their judgement—provided they share similar tastes—as a reliable indicator of the high or low quality of the movie:

The mood, unless it’s stuff like I’m all miffed in the movies because I had to get up early, and I’m not even interested in the film, that’s different, but those personal feelings adjust your sensitivity towards the film in a way that’s different for someone else, which means it can help a lot. (…) On the other hand, in many cases this can be the thing that could help the text because it can fine-tune your sensitivity, if you and the movie click, to something which will help you decode the film in greater detail, (…) with greater insight, compared to other critics (Critic 2).

At the same time, critics claim that they control these idiosyncratic factors in their work by, as they claim, striving to remain aware of their influence over evaluation and condition their review judgement by individual disposition (“If you have disposition X, you will like the film”) or by striving to generalize their view (formulate it through generally shared or comprehensible experience) to make their judgement relevant to the widest possible circle of readers of the media for which they are writing their review.

Critics therefore do not rely solely on their emotions in their evaluation, although these are a significant tool for understanding the meaning and value of a film. They also subject their emotions to critical reflection: “You don’t make up your mind by watching a movie and immediately forming an opinion, one which will never change” (Critic 2). “Working with emotions” includes distinguishing between fake (“superficial”, “cheap”) and true (“deep”, “authentic”) emotions that the film rouses in the audience, depending on how the film achieves the effect. Where the critics determine the method of inducing the emotion to be manipulative, the respondents give the film a negative review. A good example is an evaluation of Amélie (2001), which considers the film annoyingly sweet, as one of the respondents put it, because the story of an untroubled love affair in a visually stylized environment is in stark contrast to the social reality of the Montmartre district of Paris, where the film was shot.

The accompanying phenomenon of the objectification of emotion, or of the high degree of reflectivity in critics, leads to a good knowledge of their personal tastes. They describe these tastes both in terms of a preference for certain genres and in terms of evaluation criteria closely linked to their personality traits and attitudes. For example, whereas Critic 3 describes their writing about film as predominantly intended for women and tries to evaluate films from the perspective of gender equality, Critic 4 presents their taste as a masculine with preference for sci-fi and action films.

The projection of personality factors into the evaluation and the importance that the initial impression has for film evaluation are also reflected in the way respondents characterize their own work. A substantial part of the career of a critic is self-presentation, the promotion of their personal perspective: “I’ve always liked a bit of spite, and I never try to come across as a better person than I am in my writing. I want people to know what I think, what I pay attention to, and bit by bit I even put my weaknesses out there” (Critic 3). According to some of the respondents, the career of a critic requires promoting one’s “ego” and informing the readers about one’s opinion on films and hence one’s personality:

You see, a lot has changed because I’ve spent the few last years working on myself, on my ego in my private life, and so I feel now that I have my ego, like, seven years of psychoanalysis later, under better control. That means, I automatically step back because I don’t consider myself all that important. Maybe that’s why I’ve kind of stopped writing now, because work is no longer a self-important outpouring for me, the way it is, for example, for [Critic 3] (…) Yeah, he’s got it, the heavy weights, the testosterone, it’s kind of a form of self-expression, egotistic as well. And this is not me at all right now; you got me at a point where I’m debating whether to start looking for something else to do (Critic 9).

The presentation or exploitation of personal taste by means of reviews is reflected in the fact that some respondents (former professional critics) consider criticism to be exhausting and demanding whereas others emphasize its influence on their own psychology: they see critics as narcissistic, egotistic in the sense of considering themselves important and of having a strong perception of themselves and publicly proclaiming their views:

Disputes over the quality of a film are ego clashes because critics are often egotistic or narcissistic. This comes naturally, since you say that you’re fascinating enough for others to appreciate reading your take on things. (…) Having the career of a critic, you keep imposing your opinions on other people. You’re paid to say what you think. (…) Your job puts you in this position (Critic 2).

The normativity of the art-lover’s value judgements and the strategy for their justification

Art-lovers are also aware that their evaluation is conditioned by their personal disposition to evaluate selected features of a film positively or negatively, and justify their value judgement by referring to this disposition: “I freaking hate this” (Critic 1). This disposition stemmed from the speaker’s personality, values, and committed critical attitude:

The language of criticism tries hard to make it look as if you were saying some universally valid stuff, but it’s basically you who is behind it all. Nowadays people write in a personal style; you create your image with what you write, and you openly admit that this is your own personal opinion, that your evaluation also says something about you. (…) The degree to which one admits it is so is different for each critic (Critic 1).

Some respondents call this personal disposition “taste”: “Every critic has different taste, which is a philosophically heavily loaded term, but all I mean by this is that the critic likes one type of movie better than another. Some prefer gangster movies to horror movies and vice versa. This is then reflected in their writing. (…) It just reflects the personal background, what the critic likes and what not so much” (Critic 2). All the respondents emphasize that critics project their taste in the evaluation: “Absolutely. I am not free of biases as a judge. I think that I can speak for myself, and I know that this is one of a variety of opinions, and it is no better than others. I see myself as contributing to the evaluation of the movie by offering my experience” (Critic 4).

The respondents reconstruct their taste inductively based on the reflection of the relationship between their own response to the viewed work and, on the other hand, its qualities. And yet they do not consider taste an empirically verifiable and generally applicable principle. Taste allows for exceptions and so there is no guarantee that the speakers will always like the films which match their tastes. Nor is taste a permanent disposition. It varies depending on a number of factors such as education, values, needs, desires, experience, and character traits. Since the personal tendency for a particular evaluation of cinematographic works is not permanent, but changes as the speaker’s “personal economy”(Smith 1988) evolves, the respondents believe that value judgements have no intersubjective or even general validity in the sense of the correspondence between value judgements and aesthetic facts. They recognize the legitimacy of a number of different opinions on the value of the film. They argue that value judgement is neither purely subjective nor purely objective but reflects a mixture of “subjective” (the taste of the speaker) and “objective” (the material structure of the film) factors that substantiate the legitimacy of different, often competing responses and attitudes to a particular film: “a cinematographic work is always born out of the conjunction of the material ‘carrier’ of the film, its ‘objective’ qualities, which anyone can immediately see (for example, the visualization on the screen), and of the viewer, whose mind largely creates the film it perceives based on the viewer’s experience, mood, and abilities (‘subjectivity’) (…). Ultimately it is not the same movie that we all watch—the movie we watched differs in different ways from viewer to viewer (each viewer can really see completely different things happening in the film, a different story, different meaning. Some people see the same movie as a comedy, some as a tragedy, and so on)” (Critic 7). One of the respondents even estimated the share that personality traits have in film evaluation to be as high as 40 per cent.

According to the respondents, value judgements are not true or false based on whether they correspond with aesthetic facts: “Even when giving a strong opinion, I always try to stress that it’s my opinion and it’s not binding, that I don’t think anything less of others for having a different view” (Critic 5). The critic may err, according to the respondents, only when describing empirically verifiable facts, such as a blurred shot or the name of the director. Although they may not entail any claim to truth, value judgements can still be classified as better or worse from the epistemological point of view. The respondents assess the epistemic quality of value judgements mainly by the way they are reached: “I think that evaluation is extremely individual and I also want to read other reviews of the movie with different opinions. They have a totally different take, but I want to know how the reviewers got there” (Critic 2)./“The greatest reward to me is being told: ‘I don’t always agree with what you say but I understand why you think that. And it’s interesting to watch you compare the views of different groups or how you’ve reached your conclusion’” (Critic 3).

The first epistemic quality of the value judgement is therefore the plausibility of the aesthetic argumentation, how the critics substantiate their evaluation. To the respondents, however, this justification is different from the deduction of the value judgement reached by comparing the film properties to the general rule of the art (genre) quality, and from the inductive argument justifying the value judgement with an analogy between similar films that should have the same predictable effect on recipients of the same disposition. The justification is an autobiographical explanation in which the critic acknowledges his or her disposition to evaluate the film in a particular way. The critic is able to explain to the audiences what he or she dislikes or appreciates about the film and why. The second quality criterion for the value judgement is its authenticity (honesty or genuineness), that is, whether it is the personal view of the critic (instead of being advertising, mere description, or an adopted opinion), whether the opinion is in line with the impression the film made on the critic. The final epistemic quality the respondents ascribe to the value judgement is its ability to captivate and illuminate, that is, to provide new and revealing views on the evaluated work. Judgements are interesting or uninteresting depending on whether they reveal the personal attitude of the speaker to the film and enrich the debate on its artistic quality with a different and well-grounded view.

The respondents see the goal of film criticism, in accordance with the rules of the art-lover language game, not in the communication of true views or generally valid evaluations of the artistic value of a film, but in an authentic expression of one’s own reflected attitude towards the film designed to help the readers of the review to seek and form their own opinions: “It’s not about agreeing with someone; it’s about expanding your horizon with a different perspective or at least understanding why people think what they think.” (Critic 3). The aim of the critic is not to convince the audiences of the truth of their judgements, but to offer an insight from which it is clear what grounds the judgement was made on. This is how critics want to educate their readers and make them form their own view or reflect on the legitimacy of their view. Disagreements about the artistic quality of a film are therefore worthwhile, according to the respondents, only if the parties involved are willing to revise their initial views, consider the opinions of others, and find the debate fun or enlightening because it helps them evaluate films from another point of view or at least understand why someone else can view and evaluate the film differently.

The preconditions of the art-lover language game

The respondents’ answers to the question of what characteristics and prerequisites the judicious critic should have were in line with the semantics and normativity of the value judgement made by the art-lover. I have divided these entrance requirements for the art-lover game into three categories: (a) knowledge, (b) attitudes, and (c) skills.

(a) The respondents hold that first of all, critics should see a large number of films in order to be able to compare and assess originality. The requirement of experience is offset by the respondents’ call for respect for the opinions of other viewers (see below). Critics also need to be familiar with the context of the film under evaluation, current events, and the rules of film genres. The knowledge of the production context of the film helps critics to avoid making factual mistakes. The knowledge of current events is essential to understanding films targeting audiences with tastes different from the critics’:

I’m afraid that one day, someone in their twenties will come and make a revolutionary movie about their generation, and I won’t be able to get my head around it. These days I tell myself that teenagers are brainwashed by the advertising industry, so much so that they are losing any sense for the genuine. But what if they happen to discover it, will I be able to tell? Will I get their rebellions, will they make sense to me? It’s essential in my line of work to keep your presence of mind, that’s the biggest challenge. It’s very easy to grow old with old masters and treasure your youth (Critic 3).

Knowledge of genre conventions is a precondition for recognizing the quality of the film in which the conventions are consciously violated or altered.

(b) Critics need to be open, humble and tolerant, consistent, and authentic. Being open means being able to set aside one’s prejudices against a genre one is not keen on or against an alternative way of seeing or portraying the world:

I try to be open; naturally I’m happy when I like the movie; I am no knocker, despite what people sometimes like to think—oh, he can’t wait to pick that movie apart; so even if I’m not a big fan of musicals, I want the movie to be good, and the movie gets a fair chance even though it’s a musical (Critic 6).

The respondents demand humbleness and tolerance towards different views of the film because they are convinced that their own evaluation is affected by personal taste: “Yeah, but the movies are made for the audiences, not for me, and so I have to respect the fact that people, although they are flat ignorant, don’t remember anything, they often tend to make up their own minds (…) You have to be humble, respectful of the audiences.” (Critic 4) The requirement for consistency and authenticity of opinion is based on the belief that criticism is an expression of the personal taste of the critic, who projects his or her own personality in the review: “Another important thing is that he or she’s a high-quality person, someone who is not focused on film only but lives also in another cultural and social environment, and is all round consistent. That’s the dream critic, someone who doesn’t write that it’s brilliant that the movie is about vegans and then goes and orders a burger” (Critic 4). The requirement for consistent criticism does not rule out a change of opinion in relation to a change in personal taste. The change, however, needs to make sense in the context of how the personality of the critic, for example, their attitudes and views, have been developing.

(c) According to the respondents, one of the key skills of a critic is sensitivity. It is the ability to understand oneself and the reasons behind one’s emotional response to a work of art: “Critics should be sensitive, both to the work of art and to themselves. I always say I watch movies in my belly. Meaning that rather than simply watching the movies as such, I pay attention to what the movies do to me” (Critic 6).

Conclusion

The qualitative research I have conducted on the semantics and the normativity of value judgements made by film critics has, I believe, demonstrated that objectivism, which understands aesthetic judgement either as a judgement deduced from a general rule applied to a particular case or as a judgement of an unbiased observer, is not among the identified games of film critics. The opposite theoretical extreme would be the subjectivist interpretation of the value judgement, which reduces it to the causal expression or description of one’s own emotional experience.(Ayer 1971) Film critics do not play this language game either. The dominant film critics’ language game has turned out to be an art-lover game, in which the value judgement (aesthetic judgement) is a perceptual judgement with a positive or negative valence dependending on the taste of the speaker.⁹

While making the evaluation, the art-lover does not rely on any predetermined rule of aesthetic quality but on his or her own disposition. The justification of the value judgement is therefore not strictly a logical one in the sense of deductive reasoning as Noël Carroll suggests in his model of aesthetic evaluation. This does not mean, however, that the argumentation of an art-lover is not rational. The art-lover explains his or her judgement by clarifying the connection between the qualities of the film and his or her own reaction.

The art-lover game—like the ideal-observer theory—requires that its speakers meet ideal conditions for the perception and evaluation of artworks. A good critic needs to be experienced, informed, unbiased, and sensitive. On the other hand, the respondents link sensitivity (like David Hume) not only to a differentiated perception of particular film qualities, but also, indeed above all, to their own experience and to the links amongst film qualities, emotional experience, and personal taste. The critic also needs to have a distinctive style and be open to various categories of cultural production. The distinctive style, in the sense of the personal economy, is reflected in the individual taste of the critic. The respondents see the point of criticism in the fact that critics consciously project their tastes into their film evaluation. Instead of being ignored, highly individual factors and experience should be projected, in a controlled manner, into evaluation because another “epistemological” quality of evaluation is, apart from the method of justification, the ability to captivate. Good critics therefore need to be authentic and consistent in their assessment in accordance with their attitudes and tastes, and their opinions should enrich the discussion about film quality. Another entrance requirement of the art-lover language game is tolerance of other people’s opinions. The purpose of the art-lover language game is not to reveal the truth, the real or generally binding value of a film, but to express a well-grounded (comprehensible for readers) and, if possible, original opinion of the film being evaluated. The “objectivity” of aesthetic judgement or rather its epistemic value lies not in the correspondence between aesthetic judgements and aesthetic facts, but in the way these aesthetic judgements are justified.

The ideal-observer theory and the art-lover language game therefore differ fundamentally in the epistemological claims they associate with the value judgement. Whereas ideal conditions for perception in the aesthetic tradition entail a critic who is without bias or prejudice and to an objective aesthetic judgement reached jointly by ideal critics¹⁰ or all evaluators in a state of disinterested pleasure.¹¹ Unlike the requirements for Hume’s ideal critic, the personality qualifications of a film critic do not warrant a generally valid judgement that would uncover the natural connection between the qualities of a film and a particular aesthetic response. On the contrary, they enable the expression of a personal opinion that should be interesting and justified.

The entrance requirements of the art-lover language game therefore do not guarantee agreement in aesthetic judgements. On the contrary, the rules of the language game are such that speakers often disagree because of different personal tastes.(Kölbel 2003; MacFarlane 2005)¹² These disputes are, however, mitigated by the fact that the speakers are aware that discrepancies in aesthetic judgement can be caused by the difference in taste and they associate the normativity of the aesthetic judgement with the way the judgement is justified.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by the Czech Science Foundation project “Qualitative Research on the Semantics of Aesthetic Judgements” [GA18-18532S] and by the European Regional Development Fund-Project “Creativity and Adaptability as Conditions of the Success of Europe in an Interrelated World” [No. CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/16_019/0000734].

Notes on contributors

Pavel Zahrádka

Pavel Zahrádka is Associate Professor of Aesthetics and Media Industry Studies in the Department of Film and Theatre Studies, Palacký University, Olomouc. He specializes in aesthetics, the ethics of digital media and the relationship between copyright and cultural industries. In 2010 and 2011 he was a substitute professor of Philosophy and Aesthetics at the University of Münster. In 2015 and 2016, with Reinold Schmücker (University of Münster) and Thomas Dreier (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology), he led the international research group Ethics of Copying at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF), Bielefeld University. He is currently a principal investigator on a research project investigating the semantics of aesthetic judgements (funded by the Czech Science Foundation).

Notes

1. For more on methodological relativism, see (Najder 1975).

2. I also include among the representatives of the ideal-observer theory Immanuel Kant, who solved the problem of the so-called antinomy of taste—the contradiction between the subjective and objective nature of aesthetic judgement—by reinterpreting the notion of objectivity in the sense of aesthetic qualities being independent of the reaction of the evaluating subject by “objectivity” in the sense of an unbiased or impartial subject making the evaluation. The ideal observer must, according to Kant, find himself or herself in the emotional state of disinterested pleasure, which accompanies the pure judgement of taste, that is, a judgement not conditioned by the preferences, idiosyncrasies, or needs of the speaker, but relying instead on mental faculties that are common to all, and therefore having general validity(Kant 2007).

3. Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” 140–47. Hume, however, relativizes this naturalistic position in favor of the intuition that not even ideal critics necessarily agree on the judgement of taste. The conditions of ideal perception do not, in some cases, warrant a true aesthetic judgement. Critics may have conflicting views on a particular work since each of them has different taste. A true judgement is only warranted, as Hume states, by agreement among ideal critics: “the joint verdict of such [critics], wherever they are to be found, is the true standard of taste and beauty.” Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” 147.

4. The sample of film critics was based on contributors to leading Czech print and digital media (MF Dnes, Lidové noviny, Aktuálně), including film magazines and radio programs (Premiere, Cinema, the Čelisti programme of Radio Wave), and arts periodicals (Cinepur, A2, Reflex, Film a doba).

5. Grounded theory as a method for qualitative data analysis consists in three interconnected processes. Open coding helps to segment data into meaningful parts by describing, naming and classifying the phenomena under consideration. Axial coding relates the developed categories and concepts to each other based on a coding paradigm, that is, by identifying central phenomena, the context, causal conditions, consequences, as well as strategies and actions and their intervening conditions. Selective coding is the process of identifying the core category and relating all other categories to it. For more on this point, see (Strauss and Corbin 1990).

6. For the distinction between predicates of personal taste and aesthetic concepts, see (Young 2017).

7. This finding corresponds to the judgement theory of emotions, which emphasizes the link between evaluative judgement and emotions and ascribes intentionality to them, that is, emotions are directed towards something. See (Lyons 1980; Nussbaum 2001).

8. According to Bullough, the antinomy of the distance consists in the fact that the most personal affections and emotions need to be sufficiently distanced to be aesthetically appreciable on the one hand, yet excessive distancing towards emotional effects of appreciated work can, on the other hand, destroy the aesthetic experience by making it impersonal. The ideal state of aesthetic appreciation therefore requires the minimal psychical distance possible, that is the highest emotional involvement as possible without losing the distance.

9. This conclusion does not exclude the possibility that other types of actors in the cultural field (fans, intellectual critics, film makers, and so forth) play other language games corresponding, for example, to objectivist or subjectivist theories of aesthetic judgement while evaluating films or other types of artwork. The fundamental methodological failure of traditional theories of aesthetic judgement, however, is that an analyzed value judgement is taken out of the specific speech context and—as an non-indexical judgement—is made the starting point for analyzing the logical form of all aesthetic judgements.

10. Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste.”

11. Kant, Critique of Judgement.

12. These disagreements, as the respondents report, have the epistemological status of “faultless disagreement”. This means that while none of the parties to the disagreement is wrong when presenting their view, provided it is authentic and consistent, the disagreement about how to evaluate the given work of art is genuine. See (Kölbel 2003; MacFarlane 2005).