Is It Worth It? Lintott and Ethically Evaluating Environmental Art

Bibliographic Data

ID12596288
AuthorsJohn Andrew Fisher (a Department of Philosophy , Colorado University–Boulder , Boulder, CO, USA, corresponding author)
Year2007
Volume10
Issue3
Pages279-286
Publication date2007-10-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueEthics Place & Environment (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1366-879X • E-ISSN: 1469-6703
PublisherTaylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/13668790701567333
OpenAlexW2092207093
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited8

The question ‘Is it worth it?’, as originally applied to artworks by Tolstoy and here reintroduced by Sheila Lintott, opens a fruitful avenue for understanding land art. It is, however, a question with many facets in need of analysis. I will try to sketch that analysis here. Although the target of Lintott’s discussion is the category of land art, the Tolstoyan question does not come up only in the case of land art. It frequently arises in cases of controversial or extravagant types of art of many sorts, and understanding its application to various types of art illuminates their artistic content as well as their artistic value. I take the is-it-worth-it question to be a question of overall value—i.e., the sum of positive and negative values the generation of a work necessarily or contingently brings into existence. Although Tolstoy may appear to pose primarily a resource question, in actuality he pursues the issue in more complex ways that apply to land art as well as to his example of an opera. Tolstoy usefully reminds us of the multiple locations for moral and value assessment in the calculation of the overall worth of any artwork. He worries about the opportunity costs of the labor and the materials

Aesthetics · Art · Environmental ethics · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Philosophy · Photography and Visual Culture · Visual Culture and Art Theory

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