The extrinsic approach, adopted in modern times by Leo Tolstoy in What Is Art in 1986, has seldom seemed wholly satisfactory. Philosophers have constantly sought for a value in aresthetic experience that is unique to it and that, therefore, could not be obtained from any other source. The extreme version of this intrinsic approach is that associated with Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, and the French Symbolists, and summarized in the slogan "art for art's sake."(47). They also hold that in order to understand art as it should be understood, it is necessary to put aside all interests other than an interest in the work itself.
Between those two extreme views there lies, once again, a host of intermediate positions. We believe, for example, that works of art must be appreciated for their own sake, but that, in the act of apreciation, we gain from them something that is of independent value.(48). Why should not something similar be said of works of art, many of which aspire to be amusing in just the way that good jokes are？
The analogy with laughter...which, in some views, is itself a species of aesthetic interestintroduces a concept without which there can be no serious discussion of the value of art: the concept of taste.(49). We thus begin to think in terms of a distinction between good and bad reasons for laughter. Amusement at the wrong things may seem to us to show corruption of mind, cruelty, or bad taste; and when it does so, we speak of the object as not truly amusing, and feel that we have reason on our side.
Similarly, we regard some works of art as worthy of our attention and others as not. In articulating this judgment, we use all of the diverse and confusing vocabulary of moral appraisal; works of art, like people, are condemned for their sentimentality, coarseness, vulgarity, cruelty, or self-indulgence, and squally praised for their warmth, compassion, nobility, sensitivity, and truthfulness. Clearly, if aesthetic interest has a positive value, its only when motivated the good taste; it is only interest in appropriate objects that can be said to be good for us.(50).
[A] Thus a joke is laughed at for its own sake, even though there is an independent value in laughter, which lightens our lives by taking us momentarily outside ourselves.
[B] All discussion of the value of art tends, therefore, to turn from the outset in the direction of criticism: Can there be genuine critical evaluation of art, a genuine distinction between that which deserves our attention and that which does not？
[C] Art is held to be a form. of education, perhaps an education of the emotions.
[D] Artistic appreciation, appreciation, a purely personal matter, calls for appropriate means of expression. Yet, it is before anything a process of "cultivation", during which a certain part of one's "inner self" is "dug out" and some knowledge of the outside world becomes its match.
[E] If I am amused it is for a reason, and this reason lies in the object of my amusement.
[F] Such thinkers and writers believe that art is not only an end in itself but also a sufficient justification of itself.