Objectivity in Aesthetic Evaluation

By defining the basic unit of Art as an 'Experience', Dewey is challenged to explain how evaluation of Art is even possible. For, his concept of Experience is at least in part a function of factors that are unique to an experiencer, which renders it ungeneralizable beyond the circumstantial enjoyment of it, despite Dewey's ineffective struggles to abstract Art-product from Aesthetic Experience. Kant's solution, based on the impersonal commonality of the structures of any such experience, still likewise falls short of grounding any assessment of the Art-product itself. In contrast, an example that helps illustrate the possibility of such an evaluation is a well-known novel that recounts a day in the life of an Irishman, his wife, and some associates. In part because of its use of interior monologue, the description of the day's events are extraordinarily vivid. But, furthermore, the title of the novel, 'Ulysses', indicates that those events parallel the adventures of Homer's Odysseus, on the basis of a comparison, between the 'Age of Heroes' and the 'Age of Man', proposed by Vico. Hence, 'Ulysses' is, objectively, a far more literarily allusive Art-product than it might have been had Joyce called it, say, 'A Day in the Life of Leopold Bloom'. Likewise, more generally, an Art-product can be assessed strictly on objective grounds of its degree of Complexity. This is not to imply that such an evaluation suffices for any experience of a work, but it does illustrate how subjective Aesthetic enjoyment can be determined by characteristics that objectively inhere in the work.