Art, Understanding, and Mystery

Apparent orthodoxy holds that artistic understanding is finally valuable. Artistic understanding—grasping, as such, the features of an artwork that make it aesthetically or artistically good or bad—is a species of understanding, which is widely taken to be finally valuable. The objection from mystery, by contrast, holds that a lack of artistic understanding is valuable. I distinguish and critically assess two versions of this objection. The first holds that a lack of artistic understanding is finally valuable, because it preserves the pleasure of an artwork’s incomprehensibility; the second holds that a lack of artistic understanding is conditionally valuable, as the enabling condition of a finally valuable relationship with an artwork. I defend orthodoxy by arguing that both versions of the objection fail and that we have no general reason against gaining artistic understanding.