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So far I have given some reasons to doubt that Carroll has provided a helpful notion of achievement value. But we may wonder if there is not anything in the concept that Carroll has overlooked, or that we may bring out on his behalf. I am, however, pessimistic about such prospects. Let me explain why. I think it is very easy when one affirms the existence of achievement value to take

this to mean simplythe value of that which the artist has achieved. This notion

is insufficient for present purposes. That the artist has achieved it may imply

some role for intentions in definingwhat it is that the artist has achieved. But

there is a further question about the nature of the value of that which the artist

has achieved. If the relevant value is meant distinctively to beachievementvalue, then something must be said about what is valuable (a) about achievement as such (b) in the work. This is the minimum we need for it to be worth our time to further reflect on whether reference to intentions is needed to reconstruct

Intentions and Evaluation 147 such value. We might therefore return to Carroll’s earlier question: “What is it about that which the artist has done or is doing with respect to the artwork that gives the artwork value?”

One option is that achievement value is a sort of value arising simply out of an artist’s achieving her intentions. That is, there is something valuable about success as such. This is plausibly what Carroll means when he says that achievement value is “a matter of whether or not the artist has succeeded in achieving her ends” (53). But this conception gives rise to a certain obvious worry, anticipated by Carroll:

it may be charged that if the artist’s intentions are relevant to critical evaluation, then that gives the artist too much power. For in order to score a critical kudos, all the artist need do is to set her intentions very, very low. Imagine the dancer who, with no postmodern ambitions, announces her intention to simply bend over and pick up her car keys. Once she completes this action, does she deserve our applause? (69-70)

Carroll only chides the artificiality of the example, noting that artistic intentions “typically . . . commit the artist to ambitions more strenuous than bending over successfully,” that “artists rarely aim [so] low.” But the worry may be taken more abstractly, as raising a question about the very nature of the value that Carroll is touting. Why should it matter that the intention aims high or aims

low if the relevant sense of value is sensitive only tosuccess as such? If that is what

achievement value really is, then it should be equally present regardless of the

worthinessof the success. By contrast, the fact that it matters that the dancer in the example did not have postmodern ambitions indicates that we are responding to more than just the fact that the her intention was successful. At the very least, Carroll is talking about two different sorts of value: success value and (what we

may call)worthiness-of-successvalue. While it may be true that whether or not

the dancer’s performance is interpreted as being postmodern depends on her intentions, once we make this determination we could, perhaps, carry out the evaluation of her performance independently of these intentions, relative only to the interest or worthiness of the specified type of performance. That is to say,

it is not clear that reference to intentions is necessary to a critical assessment of the worthiness of an achievement, once the nature of the achievement is fixed.

Perhaps an intentionalist could make the following sort of case: It’s true that

the value of the performance in which a dancer picks up her car keys involves a lot of things beyond merely whether she succeeded in her intentions; but it involvesat least

this. So, to get a full picture of the value, intentions do have to be invoked. This is not implausible, but I still have doubts. Even if we grant that success value is a distinctive sort of value associated with successful intentions, it still remains

to be shown that it is a value of the work, not merely of the artist or of her

intentions. The present construal of such value, being concerned with success

as such, is not reassuring.8 For while it is possibly a value of one’s intention that

it succeeds, it is not at all clearly a value of theproduct of this intention that it is

the product of asuccessfulintention. More simply put, it does not seem to be

either a good or a bad thing about an artwork that it was made with largely successful intentions. Knowing further things in connection with this, like that

the intentions were ambitious, might give one anindicationof a work’s value;

but the mere fact about success certainly does not seem toconstitute any sort of

value.

Such a point has been made before, for instance by Wimsatt (1976). He describes as follows the argument to be rejected: “[t]he poet had a specific aim or plan in mind; he managed . . . to carry this out in the poem; thus he is a successful artist; his work is good art” (127). Wimsatt objects that “here we may indeed be likely to assign a kind of merit, but it should be understood as referring to the artist himself (who was ‘skillful’ enough to do what he aimed at doing) rather

than to the work.” This would be what I have called thesuccess-as-suchportion

of achievement value. For what I have called theworthiness-of-successportion,

Wimsatt suggests that we attend, not to whether we can “prove that the artist achieved his intentions,” but to “whether the proposed subject and technique were actually the most poetic conceivable” (128). Similarly, Saam Trivedi has 8. I set aside the more obvious complaint that this is just not a very interesting sort of value. As Goldman (2009) observes, “critics don’t speak as often about what artists successfully intend as they speak about what their works say or do, what kinds of effects they have on viewers or what their aesthetic properties are.”

Intentions and Evaluation 149 claimed that “while the fact that the artist has been successful and skillful in realizing her intentions in her work is good for her it is not clear that the work

must thereby be better or more valuable,” for “[such] value attaches to theartist

though not necessarily to herartwork” (2015, 705).

To reinforce the preceding series of points, let me consider an argument from Huddleston (2012a), who is responding to Dominic Lopes (2011) about the artistic/aesthetic distinction. The context of their disagreement need not detain us here, but I will set the scene a little, for some of it is relevant.

Lopes laments the rise in the number of philosophers aligning themselves with a notion of non-aesthetic artistic value, and argues that any artistic value

that is a value of art as art, not merely in art, is subsumable under aesthetic

value. He considers, on behalf of his opponents, achievement value as a possible candidate for non-aesthetic artistic value, putting the case for it as follows (530):

art works are achievements whose value is realized in how they come to be.. . . We can assume, in general, that an item’s value as a member of a kind is its value as the product of an achievement of that kind. For example, the value of a song as a work of music is its value as a musical achievement. On this model,

V is a value of an art work as art = V is a value of the

work as the product of an artistic achievement.

Lopes accepts that “making a work of art is often an achievement,” but he does not think it follows that “it is in every case an artistic achievement.” He doubts the “artistic” part, for he does not think that an “achievement-based theory of artistic value” will be able to supply a suitable “theory of what makes an act artistic.”

My own concerns are somewhat different from Lopes’s, though we are both in a manner objecting to achievement value. I am concerned less to withhold the label “artistic” from such putative value and more to interrogate what kind of value it is even supposed to be. Lopes, following others, talks of a work having “value as the product of an achievement,” but it is possible for a work

“achievement,” or “product of achievement”—without thereby having some

distinctiveachievement value.

Huddleston, in disagreement with Lopes, claims that “achievement value is ultimately going to need to underwrite artistic value. To the extent that

aesthetic value is a component of artistic value, it is onlyderivativelyso” (2012a,

712). His argument for this appeals to a case of indiscernibles, one Giorgione’s

The Tempestand the other an array of paint randomly generated on a canvas by a machine. The two are said to produce “very rich aesthetic experience in many of the same ways,” but Lopes, adds Huddleston, “will surely want to say that

only the painting produced by Giorgione hasartisticvalue.” We might reply

that the difference comes down to one’s being a work of art and the other’s not, but Huddleston believes that this is “just [to] restate instead of [to] answer the pressing question: What feature accounts for this drastic difference?” (713). Huddleston’s preferred answer is that “Giorgione’s painting is a great human achievement and the array is not. When aesthetic value is a value of art as art,

it is onlybecausethis aesthetic valuehas been achieved by an artist.”

Here is my problem with such an answer. It might well be that what

explainsThe Tempest’s aesthetic values also being artistic values, when this isn’t

so for the array, is that it is an “achievement.” But it is something further to

say thatThe Tempest’s being an achievement is a distinctive value that it has, an

achievement value. A property can serve to explain why an object’s aesthetic

values are also artistic values without thereby itself constituting something

valuable about that object. At least in principle. Huddleston would need to say

more about why this distinguishing feature is furthermore a distinctivevalueof

the object it distinguishes. (He seems to want to say this.) The question, again, is merely: what makes one object an artwork and the other not? Lopes makes the useful observation that not all (purported) art-status-conferring properties also “realize any characteristically artistic value” (2011, 525). He has here in mind the so-called “institutional theory,” on which it is not an artistic value of a work that it has been inducted into (or is a member of ) the relevant institution.

Huddleston’s example is, incidentally, very similar to one given by Gregory Currie in support of a very similar point, a denial that “a work’s aesthetic properties are independent of the artist’s achievement” (1989, 36). Currie asks

Intentions and Evaluation 151 us to imagine an artistically superior Martian race an average child of which produces a painting that is unremarkable for them but indiscernible from a

painting which we humans hold in high regard (Picasso’sGuernica). The idea is

supposed to be that both value judgments may be correct (ours that the human painting is great, theirs that the Martian one is not), each being predicated on the achievement that the relevant work represents relative to its community (human in the one case, Martian in the other). This is said to explain the alleged difference in value, the conclusion being that a work’s status as an achievement is relevant to its evaluation. I have no problem granting this. All I have been wondering is whether this status itself represents an artistic value, and whether, furthermore, its critical reconstruction as a value requires invoking authorial intentions. It is not clear to me that either question should be answered in the affirmative.

What I wish to conclude from my efforts in this section is the following.

There are reasons to doubt that achievement value is a distinctive sort ofvalue,

to doubt that it is a value ofartworks, and to doubt, even if it is an interesting sort

of artistic value, that to reconstruct what is interesting about it one must invoke the artist’s intentions. I have argued for the first doubt by raising questions about what is supposed to be valuable about achievement as such, for the second by

raising questions about what is supposed to be valuable aboutartworksin their

being anartist’s achievement, and for the third by separating the relevant value,

or one construal of it, into that of successsimpliciterand that of theworthiness

of the success (where only the former, which is less interesting, seems to need

reference to intentions).9 While I do not take these doubts entirely to foreclose

the possibility of achievement value helping to answer the value-sensitivity objection, I myself don’t see how it could.

9. It might be objected that there is a third option, on which it is not merely success as such, nor quite worthiness of success, but something like theintelligibilityof the success, the fact of an agent’s creative handling of a medium, that constitutes an achievement thatipso factois artistically valuable. I thank Eileen John for this suggestion. See John (2014), in which this is described as “taking reflective charge” (265). I am not entirely sure how to understand such a claim in the light of my own efforts, but I suspect that my positive proposal, gestured at near the end of this chapter and more fully worked out in the next, may accommodate the sort of insight at issue, in terms not of a distinctive kind of value but of a value-sensitive critical process which sometimes makes essential reference to such facts about the artist.