The complaint of the traditionalist of the previous chapter can perhaps be summed up as the claim that much art since Duchamp's Fountain is not worth attending to: that is, a great deal of modern and contemporary art simply is not valuable. As we saw, we could not answer the question “But is it art?” until we had a better grasp of what it was that was at issue in asking the question. For analogous reasons, we cannot answer the question “But is it valuable?” until we have a better grasp of what it is for a work of art to be valuable. Indeed, we have to start a little further back even than that. For we cannot grasp what it is for art to be valuable until we have some grasp of what it is for anything to be valuable: that is, some grasp of the nature of value.

For some people, nihilists, nothing is of value. For others, the only things that are of value are human experiences. For yet others, there are plenty of things that are of value. This is a messy and complicated part of philosophy, and going into it will not tell us anything distinctive about art as whatever we conclude will apply to everything valuable, not only to art. So I am going to presuppose that works of art, like many other things, are candidates for being valuable. It will then be up to art critics to sort those works of art that are valuable from the ones that are not. My discussion will concern the kind of value this might be. Before that, however, I need to establish two things about value.