“A painting is meant to be viewed, a symphony to be heard, a novel to be read-and not by the artist alone. Works of art are vehicles of communication, and communication is possible only within a comprehending community. Art for the artist alone is as problematic as a private language. For a collocation of pigments to be art there must be publicly accessible standards of interpretation that constitute it as such, just as public rules of syntax and semantics are necessary to constitute the emission of a sequence of sounds as the utterance of a sentence. An artist can selfishly withhold his masterwork from others and a speaker can confine himself to soliloquies, but even so they trade on practices that essentially refer to the capacity of others to scrutinize meanings. And, of course, it is rarely the case that an artist will be satisfied perpetually to sequester his creations. The artist who neglects to provide basic courtesies to others nonetheless hurls at them his personal vision of the beautiful, He demands their wonder and appreciation for what he has wrought. Their acts of valuing the work of art constitute value for the artist. Art that can be valued only by the artist and not by others is a conceptual impossibility; art that in fact is valued only by the artist is a failure.”

- Loren E. Lomasky

Philosophy professor at the University of Virginia

from his book Persons, Rights, and the Moral Community, 1987

Sent in by Morgan Ashcom