Art Forms Emerging: An Approach to Evaluative Diversity in Art

Abstract

Artworks are rationally evaluable and comparable within their art form, but not from outside. Beethoven's string quartets cannot be evaluated against works of Hindustani music. This is the problem of evaluative diversity: local commensurability, global indeterminacy. This article sketches an approach to the problem based on novel conceptions of aesthetic pleasure and cultural learning, and on the Darwinian Principle of Divergence as applied to cultural evolution.