This is Aesthetics Bytes, a series for philosophy bites.
With me, Nigel Warburton and me, David Edmonds.
Aesthetics Bites is made in association with the London Aesthetics Forum and made possible by a grant from the British Society of Aesthetics.
Alongside the artist, there's the critic.
There are critics and reviewers of dance, theatre, art, film, and so on.
But what is the role of the criticism, and in particular is part of the critics role to evaluate works of art?
Noel Cowell of the City University of New York thinks it is.
Noel Carroll, welcome to Aesthetics Bites.
Glad to be here.
The topic we're going to focus on today is criticism.
Why are you interested in criticism now?
What's special about criticism at present, there's.
A kind of crisis amongst critics.
A recent poll by Columbia University registered skepticism about the process of making evaluation.
I think of criticism as being essentially a matter of evaluation, whereas a number of practicing art critics today, in fact the majority, think of evaluation as the least important thing that they do.
For them, the important thing they do is to explain the context of the work, the ideas in the work, to come up with interpretations of the work.
But they don't feel that criticism is important.
I, on the other hand, want to argue that criticism, though of course it involves things like description and interpretation, is essentially a matter of evaluation.
After all, if it were simply a matter of description and interpretation, there'd be no distinction between what the art historian or the cultural theorist does.
What is unique about the critical enterprise is that it evaluates.