Artistic Integrity

In the opening paragraph of J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, as Holden Caulfield is filling us in on his family background, he tells us that his older brother, D. B., a short‐story writer, is now “out in Hollywood … being a prostitute” (, 2). I have to admit that when I first read The Catcher in the Rye, in junior high school, this sentence puzzled me: was Holden's brother really a prostitute?! But then I figured it out: Holden meant that his brother was a prostitute because he was selling his artistic talents to the movie industry; that is to say, he was violating his artistic integrity by selling out.

Philosophical discussions of artistic integrity arise chiefly in the form of examples raised in the course of analyzing personal integrity more generally. I believe, however, that artistic integrity deserves independent examination, raising some distinctive questions that require distinctive answers. References to artistic integrity abound in popular culture, usually in situations where an artist is accused of abandoning his or her artistic integrity by “selling out.” In this article I want to try to understand what artistic integrity is, what “selling out” is, and how the latter undermines or subverts the former. I argue that an artist lacks artistic integrity if, in the process of creation, he or she places some other—competing, distracting, or corrupting—value over the value of the artwork itself, in a way that violates his or her own artistic standards.1

I. PERSONAL/MORAL INTEGRITY VERSUS ARTISTIC INTEGRITY

In the last few decades, a rich and thought‐provoking literature has developed on the topic of personal integrity, with contributions from some of the best minds in the English‐speaking philosophical world: Harry Frankfurt (, 1987), Bernard Williams (), Cheshire Calhoun (). Frankfurt presents integrity as a kind of integration or whole‐heartedness, in which our first‐order desires and second‐order desires are aligned with one another. Williams defines integrity as bound up with our commitment to identity‐conferring projects, which can be the source of our very willingness to “go on,” to continue with the project of life itself. Calhoun identifies integrity as both a personal and a social virtue, concerned less fundamentally with our relationship to ourselves than with our relationship to others: for Calhoun integrity involves “standing for something” before the rest of the moral community, as “co‐deliberators” who “share the goal of determining what is worth doing” (, 257).

On all three accounts, integrity is a matter of identifying with or being faithful to one's own values and projects, whether or not these values and projects are sanctioned by objective moral principles recognized by others. It may seem, however, that a person of integrity should be committed to values and projects that are not only personally important but morally admirable, or at least not manifestly immoral, to principles that are not only mine but true. For it seems that even someone blatantly immoral, such as a conscientious Nazi, could act wholeheartedly as a Nazi, adopt Nazism as a fundamental ground project, and stand for Nazism in the public square—but many would balk at calling such a person a paragon of integrity. On moralized accounts of integrity, or moralized revisions to these prominent accounts, the person with integrity must act on correct, or at least defensible, moral values.

Yet moralized accounts themselves seem to miss some crucial feature of integrity: the sense in which we can grant that someone is acting out of integrity even as we do not share the values on which he or she is acting, in which we can respect someone for acting according to his or her values, mistaken though they be (but perhaps only within the limits of what we take to be reasonable disagreement among persons of goodwill). This tension in integrity has been recognized by some of integrity's most insightful analysts. Even as Calhoun writes, “to value integrity is to place value on an agent's acting from her reasons, whether they are good ones or not” (, 248), she adds the qualification, “This is not to say that the thought that a person is morally mistaken has no bearing on the question of his integrity. Sometimes it is hard to imagine how someone could care about what principles they act on, be un‐self‐deceived, sincere, critically reflective, nonhypocritical, concerned with more than their own comfort, and get things morally so wrong” (249n20). Likewise, Lynne McFall argues, “When we grant integrity to a person, we need not approve of his or her principles or commitments, but we must at least recognize them as ones a reasonable person might take to be of great importance and ones that a reasonable person might be tempted to sacrifice to some lesser yet still recognizable goods” (, 85). So there seem to be two conflicting intuitions regarding personal or moral integrity: the one prioritizing fidelity to one's own commitments, the other reluctant to ascribe integrity to those whose commitments fall outside a certain range of acceptability.

Thus far, artistic integrity is not markedly different from personal integrity as presented by Frankfurt, Williams, and Calhoun. As with Frankfurt's account of personal integrity, which involves endorsing at a higher level values which one holds and acts upon at a lower level, artistic integrity involves wholeheartedly embracing and acting upon aesthetic standards one sets for oneself. As with Williams's account of devoting oneself to “ground projects,” the artist acting with artistic integrity takes art to be one of his or her ground projects—perhaps the most fundamental ground project—and respects it as such. As in Calhoun's account of standing for something, the artist stands by his or her own aesthetic standards as a responsible member of a community, here, an artistic community. All three accounts of personal integrity, as we saw above, can be criticized for not insisting that the standards marking personal integrity also be correct—or at least defensible—standards. A parallel objection can be lodged against my account of artistic integrity—that the artist of integrity needs to aim at meeting not only personal artistic standards but standards of genuine aesthetic merit—although I believe it carries somewhat less force in this arena.

Consider someone who produces really hideous work, embarrassingly bad work, schlocky work. Suppose this artist toils unceasingly, say, to produce velvet paintings of Elvis to sell at flea markets. Or quasi‐pornographic bodice‐ripper romances. Or jingles for ads to sell mouthwash and deodorant. Even if this artist honors his or her own artistic standards, these deviate so much from standards widely shared by the artistic community that it may feel perverse to honor his or her artistic integrity. However, I find myself more willing to respect the artistic integrity of the schlocky artist than the moral integrity of the conscientious Nazi. I find myself pulled to say that if an artist gives his or her best to the work, as art, he or she may be an inferior artist but need not lack artistic integrity. It would compromise artistic integrity if the artist altered his or her own vision of the work in deference to prevailing aesthetic standards, if the artist failed to be true to his or her own artistic vision for this very reason. Although others may say the same of the moral integrity of the conscientious Nazi—we may imagine Nazis pained to act as they do, but forcing themselves to do so out of allegiance to principles that they themselves truly endorse—I find it harder to use the word “moral” and the word “Nazi” in the same description.

Why might we (if others share my intuition) be less tempted to think that production of bad art signals lack of integrity on the part of the artist than to think that immoral acts signal lack of integrity on the part of a moral agent? One reason may be that we have less confidence about objective standards of aesthetic merit than we do about objective standards of morality and so accept a wider range of deviation in performance. Are there any artistic principles we would hold to be as binding on all artists as, say, the prohibition against torture and murder of innocent children is on all moral agents? Another reason may be that we think the production of bad art simply matters less: unaesthetic art is less harmful to others than immoral behavior (this would not be true of immoral art, such as Nazi propaganda films, a distinct issue that I address below). Perhaps most centrally, we tend to expect greater variation in artistic competence even among those seriously committed to their art, whereas we do require a certain minimal level of moral competence from all moral agents. Artists differ in talent as moral agents differ in virtue, but we do not condemn those with lesser talent for their artwork as we criticize those deficient in crucial virtues for their actions. Indeed, we may feel that the creation of art contributes to human flourishing—of the artist him‐ or herself—in such a way that we would not want to discourage even the most untalented from engaging in it. If this is right, an artist might produce inferior artwork without betraying any lack of artistic integrity. What he or she might lack, instead, is simply talent, training, or resources to create.

Let us add the feature that the artist produces artistically flawed work, knowing it to be flawed. This would be comparable to a moral agent who knows that he or she is acting badly (which the conscientious Nazi, by hypothesis, does not). Mere knowledge of the work's badness alone is not enough to impugn artistic integrity: it is not enough that one merely knows that one's work is disappointing. (And work that disappoints the artist may nonetheless be work that others will judge as excellent.) Many, if not most, artists are disappointed by their own work, perhaps because they have extremely high standards, perhaps because they have realistic standards but are working under difficult conditions, perhaps because they recognize the painful limitations of their own talent. In the same way, many moral agents, especially those drawn to utilitarianism or more rigorous forms of deontology, are constantly aware of falling short of their own standards as well. Who can maximize the good every day in every way? But such failures need not signal a lack of moral integrity.

In order to accuse an artist of lacking artistic integrity, we need to add the condition that the artist produces substandard work somehow on purpose. This need not mean that he or she consciously sets out to produce work that is bad, in some perverse way setting “badness” as the goal (any more than the agent who lacks moral integrity perversely aims at evil). But this artist willingly produces work that is less good, by his or her own standards, than work he or she is otherwise capable of producing, because he or she is driven by some external factor such as money or fame (or political pressure to engage in self‐censorship). Those who lack moral integrity similarly may watch themselves fall away from moral rectitude, doing what they know to be morally questionable, because of external temptations.

One central question in examining artistic integrity is whether all attention to external factors, in whatever form they present themselves, is necessarily a violation of artistic integrity. Is the artist of integrity immune to any considerations except pure allegiance to art for art's sake? Matthew Kieran distinguishes between extrinsic and intrinsic motivation for the creation of art. Although not using the language of artistic integrity, he argues that exemplary creative virtue requires an artist to work with “intrinsic” motivation (“aiming [only] at the values internal to the relevant domain”) rather than “extrinsic” motivation (aiming at “ends or goals that … can be instrumentally realized through performing the relevant task or kind of activity”; Kieran , 129).2 So another way of posing my question would be: is intrinsic motivation in its purest form required for attributions of artistic integrity?

If so, discussion of artistic integrity would resonate with discussion of the integrity of art itself, the view “that art should be appreciated not in terms of its economic, heuristic, religious, or intellectual worth, but in terms of its artistic value alone” (Novitz , 9). A parallel here would be to the Kantian view that only acts done from the good will, the will to act for the sake of duty, have any moral worth. It is beyond the scope of this article to enter debates over the nature and grounding of the value of art. I will content myself by merely endorsing David Novitz's conclusion that “it is false to maintain that aesthetic values are pure and totally unmediated by economic, moral, intellectual, religious or gender interests. For all of these reasons, then, any attempt to explain aesthetic judgments as devoid of, and wholly uninfluenced by, the concerns and interests of everyday life is bound to fail” (19). But I hope the discussion that follows will also give us reason to resist the conclusion that unalloyed allegiance to art is an ideal toward which artists need to aspire as the price of maintaining their artistic integrity. The glorification of some mythical purity of art may belong less to artistic integrity and more to artistic ego. So let us see if we can distinguish “selling out” from merely selling.

II. SELLING VERSUS “SELLING OUT”

There is an unfortunate tendency to romanticize artistic poverty, to be downright suspicious of art's commercial success. We thrive on the story that Van Gogh sold only three paintings, for a pittance, during his lifetime, or that Emily Dickinson's poems lay unpublished in her recluse's drawer. The Biblical warning that one cannot serve both God and money becomes the claim that one cannot serve both art and money. Here we see the thought that the artist should, so far as possible, resist the corrosive temptations of the market altogether. Prostitution, after all, is defined as trading for money a form of intimate human interaction that should be engaged in for love or joy, for “its own sake”—that is, reasons other than financial remuneration. By extension, prostitution is then more broadly understood as corrupting or demeaning anything we view as beautiful and sacred, anything that by its very nature should not be commodified and commercialized—such as art. In his book‐length meditation on the noncommercial nature of creativity, The Gift, Lewis Hyde writes, “It is the exception, not the rule, to be paid for writing of literary merit.…There is cash in ‘popular’ work—gothic novels, thrillers, and so forth, but their authors do not become bona fide members of the literary community” (, 100). On this kind of account, all selling is tantamount to selling out.

For an opposing view, hear Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope, who shocked the readers of his autobiography by his meticulous record of every pound and shilling he earned from his craft. He writes, “I am well aware that there are many who think that an author in his authorship should not regard money,—nor a painter, or sculptor, or composer in his art” (, 88). Rejecting this view, Trollope likens the artist to the butcher and baker—and to the barrister, clergyman, doctor, engineer, and architect—as a human being who in pursuing his chosen profession desires “to do the best he can for himself and those about him,” pointing out that Titian, Rubens, and Shakespeare did not “disregard their pecuniary rewards” (89). It is only if “a man writes his books badly, or paints his pictures badly, because he can make his money faster in that fashion than by doing them well, and at the same time proclaims them to be the best he can do” that he rightfully earns our scorn for a species of dishonesty (91).3 So Trollope's view can be taken to be that while financial considerations can lead to a compromise in artistic integrity, they do not invariably—or even generally—do so. While I cannot offer much by way of argument here, I find myself in agreement with Trollope, not with Hyde. At the very least, Trollope seems clearly correct that many of the greatest and most passionately dedicated artists in human history were glad to be paid—and sometimes paid well—for their art.

I want now to consider more systematically a variety of ways in which a concern for money (or fame) can influence the creative/artistic process to see which, if any, are problematic for the integrity of the artist. What follows is my attempt at constructing a spectrum of greater‐or‐lesser artistic independence in order to ask if this coincides with a spectrum of greater‐or‐lesser artistic integrity.

First case: the artist may (or may not) end up making money and achieving fame, but in either case, he or she has no conscious thought whatsoever of these external rewards while creating. Indeed, let us say that the artist leaves the work unpublished or unperformed during his or her lifetime; it reaps only posthumous admiration. Here we have the clearest possible case that the artist is devoted to art alone, dedicated with purely intrinsic motivation to art for art's sake only.

Second case: the artist does indeed want to meet basic financial needs and achieve some measure of recognition (as Trollope notes most human beings do), but these concerns have no discernible influence on either the creative process or the work produced. Of course, one's subconscious may engage with these concerns in all kinds of devious and dubious ways, but at least consciously and directly, the artist works only for the sake of the work itself, even if hoping somebody may value the work enough to pay for it and give it praise.

Third case: the artist does consider how best to achieve fortune and fame in making the initial choice of what kind, form, or genre of art to create. An author might decide to write a work of commercial, rather than literary, fiction, or, like Holden's brother (or, for that matter, Faulkner), head to Hollywood; if already writing commercial fiction, he or she might deliberately try for a “big” book by choosing a “high concept” idea. A musician might decide to compose a film score rather than a symphony. His or her goal is to devote full artistic energies in the service of a kind of work that will be, or at least that is hoped to be, commercially viable. But after making this initial decision, the artist then works with disregard for anything but the excellence of the artistic product. Consider this confession from an interview with novelist John Updike. Asked whether he was bothered by “having to write for a living,” Updike replied,

No, I always wanted to draw or write for a living. Teaching, the customary alternative, seemed truly depleting and corrupting. I have been able to support myself by and large with the more respectable forms—poetry, short stories, novels—but what journalism I have done has been useful. I would write ads for deodorant or labels for catsup bottles if I had to. The miracle of turning inklings into thoughts and thoughts into words, and words into metal and print and ink never palls for me. (, 38–39)

While Updike makes no specific mention of striving to realize his own artistic standards in writing deodorant ads or catsup bottle labels, he does imply that all involve the same exercise of creativity in which he could take the same intense joy.

Fourth case: the artist gives heed to fortune and fame not only in choosing the type of work to create but in the process of creating the work itself. A concern for how the book will be received shapes the artistic choices made not only in the initial conception of the type of product to produce, but in all stages of its subsequent production. (I realize that for many artists, product and process cannot be distinguished in an artificially clear‐cut way.) An author might study best sellers to see how they are structured and paced; a musician might test out a composition on a “focus group” of listeners. Writer Elizabeth Gilbert shares her experience of achieving her first short‐story publication, in Esquire magazine. A month before publication, she was told that a major advertiser had withdrawn from the issue necessitating space sacrifices. Gilbert was told that, if she wanted her story to be published in Esquire, she would have to cut thirty percent from a ten‐page short story to which she had devoted a year and a half of her life. Her first thought was that “my dignity [we might say, her integrity] as an artist was offended by the very idea of mutilating my life's best work simply because a car company had pulled an advertisement from a men's magazine” (, 231). Her second thought, the one she acted upon, was to grab “a red pencil and … cut that thing down to the bone,” taking this as a “fantastic creative challenge” that transformed her story into a new version that “was neither better nor worse than the old version; it was just profoundly different” (231). For Gilbert, it was not the product of her creativity that was sacred, but the creativity itself that produced it.

Fifth and final case: the artist either selects the product (as in case three) or produces the product (as in case four) in a way that he or she believes compromises its artistic qualities, bowing to the considerations presented in the two previous cases in the belief that by doing so he or she has intentionally made the work worse. Thomas Hill, Jr., offers this example: “Suppose an artist of genius and originality paints a masterwork unappreciated by his contemporaries. Cynically, for money and social status, he alters the painting to please the tasteless public and then turns out copies in machine‐like fashion. He does it deliberately, with full awareness of his reasons” (, 19). In Hill's view, this artist lacks self‐respect. He also lacks artistic integrity.

I argue that we have a clear instance of an artist violating his or her own artistic integrity only in this fifth case. It is a mistake to conclude that the third and fourth cases—merely involving conscious attention to the commercial viability of a work in either the choice of the kind of art to pursue or in its creative production—necessarily compromise artistic integrity. In my view, Holden Caulfield was wrong to think his brother had sold out simply because he now wrote screenplays instead of short stories, if his brother brought his full artistic powers to bear on their creation. It is true that in cases three and four, the artist does make choices within the pursuit of art for reasons external to the activity of art itself. But in itself this is not enough to impugn his or her artistic integrity. In our fifth case, however, the author trades off what he or she takes to be artistic quality to achieve commercial, popular, or critical success. In order to achieve an external goal, he or she has intentionally sacrificed the artistic quality of the work. Thus, on this account, the artist is the judge of whether or not he or she has violated artistic integrity. The same artistic choices, influenced by the same concern for fame and fortune, leading to the same final product, may compromise the artistic integrity of artist A, but not of artist B. The difference turns on how the two artists perceive these choices. In this way, artistic integrity is relative to the artist's own standards.

III. OBJECTIONS AND REPLIES

Let me now consider some objections and further questions that can be addressed to this account of artistic integrity.

First, do artists even have clearly articulated standards? How many artists self‐consciously formulate standards to themselves in any explicit or overt way? This same kind of objection can be posed to accounts of personal integrity, such as McFall's, on which personal integrity requires “that an agent … subscribe to some consistent set of principles or commitments” (, 83). Do most moral agents, even those with unimpeachable integrity, have a “consistent set of principles or commitments”? However, even in the absence of clearly stated standards, moral or artistic, both moral agents and practicing artists can have a workable, rough‐and‐ready sense of what it would mean to act in a way they themselves think is wrong or produce art they themselves regard as inferior.

Perhaps, in further response to this first objection, we should consider eschewing reference to artistic standards altogether in favor of language about fidelity to the artist's own artistic vision. The question of whether artists violate their artistic integrity would then turn not on whether they lower their artistic standards in creating the artwork, in response to external pressures or incentives, but whether they alter their artistic vision of what it could and should be. I have some sympathy with this way of expressing artistic integrity, but I do not think it succeeds in eliminating at least an implicit reference to some kind of evaluative procedure, where evaluation is understood as measurement against some set of standards, however vague and fuzzy. Surely an artist pursues a certain vision of what to create because he or she thinks it will produce a work that is beautiful, thought‐provoking, engaging, challenging—all terms that have an evaluative component. So the change in vocabulary does not seem all that significant for my account. Note that in the example from Elizabeth Gilbert, Gilbert changes her original vision of her short story but the resultant story still meets her standards of excellence.

Second, what if Elizabeth Gilbert had thought her cuts made the work worse? Does artistic integrity really demand that artists ignore all nonartistic considerations that might worsen the work in their own eyes (for example, the physical and economic constraints of production, including such factors as the cost of materials, the size of the work as a physical or temporal object, the attention span of the audience, and more)? If so, is not this an unreasonably demanding account? I do find myself thinking that, for some extreme examples, if an artist insists his or her artistic vision can be realized only by creating a statue of solid gold, or a composer only by a work extending without a break over a period of days, or a novelist only by a novel of 10,000 pages, they should work toward developing standards that are more flexible in terms of the world as it is and their human audience members as they are. It would seem unreasonable for artists to have such a fixed and fanatical vision of their artwork that they can make no compromises at all in order to bring the work into production and give it an audience. (This anticipates my reply to the fifth objection raised, below.)

Third, what if the artist's standard just is to make money or to achieve fame? McFall gives us the example of Harold and John, who live their lives single‐mindedly committed to the pursuit of fame and fortune, respectively, commenting on how odd it would be for us to say, “Harold demonstrates great integrity in his single‐minded pursuit of approval” or “John was a man of uncommon integrity. He let nothing—not friendship, not justice, not truth—stand in the way of his amassment of wealth” (, 83). She suggests that “none of these claims can be made with a straight face” because “Where there is no possibility of its loss, integrity cannot exist” (83). Although I have resisted defining artistic integrity in a way that makes it absolutely immune to any external considerations (that is, I have argued that an artist with integrity might indeed care about financial security or community recognition), McFall's point reminds us that artistic integrity would be meaningless if art itself were not held to be an independent value that could come into conflict with other competing values. In a memorable turn of phrase, she writes, “In order to sell one's soul, one must have something to sell” (84). To compromise one's artistic standards for a competing motivation, one must have distinctly artistic standards that do not simply reduce to the achieving of nonartistic goals.

Fourth, what if the artist is self‐deceived about meeting his or her standards? My view requires deference to an artist's own opinion about whether or not he or she has lowered artistic standards in the service of competing values. But surely the artist might be mistaken. As Richard Littke poses the problem:

We are not always in touch with our own motives or the quality of our work. Suppose that nagging concerns about money have drawn the artist toward a sort of sentimentalism in her work that she previously disdained and would continue to disdain if only she detected it in her work. Yet she currently can't see it or sort of sees it, but deceives herself about it.

In such a case, Littke suggests, the artist seems to lack artistic integrity, even though she makes no conscious deviation from her standards for the sake of other motives. So we need one final refinement to the account: Artists lack artistic integrity if they intentionally fail to adhere to their own artistic standards or if they are deceiving themselves about their intentional adherence to those standards.

Fifth, this leads, however, to a different objection. If an artist may be self‐deceived about violating his or her own standards, convincing him‐ or herself that the standards have merely been altered rather than lowered, does my account suggest that we should be suspicious of a loss of artistic integrity whenever an artist's standards change? No. In her critique of McFall's account of integrity, Victoria Davison argues that, far from forbidding us to change, integrity can require us to change. She is wary of rigid adherence to moral principles that, insensitive to context, allow for no exceptions. We may have even greater reason to be wary of inflexible artistic principles (I find myself thinking of an artist friend of mine who prided himself on having taken a vow never to have a straight line in any of his works). In order to be true to oneself, Davison writes, “one must be willing to explore commitments and change them when necessary. This is what it means to acknowledge ourselves as the changing beings that we are” (, 183). Calhoun adds that we also need to be willing to change in dialogue with others: “Anyone who regards herself as an equal in autonomous judgment to others cannot be indifferent to what others think” (, 241). As an author myself, I worry about young authors who bristle at comments from editors or other readers who suggest alterations in their work, who lack the flexibility to learn and grow from insightful critique. Integrity is not the same thing as rigidity.

Sixth, what if by (in my view) lowering my standards, I end up producing a work of artistic greatness, as judged both by contemporary audiences and by the verdict of posterity? One famous case here is Louisa May Alcott, who wrote Little Women on her publisher's prompting for a commercially viable title. In her journal she scribbled, “Mr. N. wants a girls’ story, and I begin ‘Little Women.’ … So I plod away, though I don't enjoy this sort of thing. Never liked girls or knew many, except my sisters”; “Sent twelve chapters of ‘L.W.’ to Mr. N. He thought it dull; so do I” (, 413). Yet the book she produced, despite her own denigration of it, became one of the enduring classics of American literature. It seems appropriate to say that, nonetheless, Alcott violated her own artistic integrity in writing it. Yet she did express subsequent fondness for the book: “Proof of whole book came. It reads better than I expected. Not a bit sensational, but simple and true, for we really lived most of it; and if it succeeds that will be the reason of it” (413). This suggests there may have been some self‐deception, some swagger and bravado, in her earlier disdain for the project, her sneering at writing a “girls’ story,” although of a different sort from the kind suggested by Littke.

Seventh, does this account suggest that artists with integrity must be committed to devoting maximal energy to their art, always doing their very best, despite any and all competing considerations? Barrett Emerick offers the example of

a great novelist who, at the end of her career, finds herself simply exhausted. She loves to write and has a few ideas for stories she'd like to tell and that her audience would enjoy. But she knows that to make them truly great, writing them will take more energy than she wants to expend. I'm inclined to say that if she chooses to write a good but not great novel, while having it within her ability to write the great novel, she could still retain her integrity, even though she is choosing not to write the best thing that she could.

I find myself agreeing with Emerick. There is a difference between simply allocating less energy to one's art—perhaps for reasons of total exhaustion, but perhaps also because of a concern to maintain a healthy work–life balance—versus deliberately allocating what energy one does possess in a way to produce (in one's own judgment) an inferior artistic product. Artistic integrity need not require sacrificing all other life goals to one's art.

Eighth, what if, instead of lowering my artistic standards and altering my artistic vision for financial, political, or other reasons, I simply decide to abandon art altogether? Instead of becoming a schlocky painter, hack musician, or ghostwriter, I might decide to turn a deaf ear to my muse and get a job on Wall Street or go to law school or work in the deli at Whole Foods. Is this also a violation of artistic integrity, even, as it were, carrying that violation to its limit? Kelly Weirich asks:

If lowering one's artistic standards for non‐artistic ends amounts to compromising one's artistic integrity, is it also the case that for an artistically gifted person not to produce art at all is a compromise of artistic integrity? Is is incumbent on an artistically gifted person to produce art, and possibly additionally to share that art with her community? If so, why? Is there an analogous imperative for other skills? And if not, why not? Why is it worse to produce bad art knowingly than not to produce any at all, thereby providing no artistic benefit to one's community?4

I have two thoughts here, which are in tension with each other. On the one hand, it might be an expression of artistic integrity to give up art in these circumstances. If I cannot make art according to my own artistic vision, I might say, better not to make art at all, to renounce art altogether, rather than besmirch her. I might respect art too much, and respect myself too much as an artist, to make art badly. Note that a moral agent cannot similarly decide to opt out of moral striving altogether, fearful of falling short of his or her own moral standards. Here we see a central difference between artistic and moral integrity.

On the other hand, renunciation of art in these circumstances might be a mere excuse for abandoning my own deepest values as well as my own obligations to my community. We sometimes have the sense, when encountering someone of great talent, that such a person owes it to his or her community (others things equal) to develop that talent and devote it to the common good. We feel this way more to the degree that the talent is indeed exceptional. And we feel this way more when the object of the talent has exceptional social value. We would not want our greatest artists—or perhaps any artist—to maintain their artistic integrity in its purest, most high‐minded form by depriving the world of their art, thereby making it a less rich, diverse, and beautiful place.

IV. ARTISTIC INTEGRITY AS A SOCIAL VIRTUE

This leads me to an important element still missing from my account as laid out thus far. Calhoun corrected the individualistic accounts of personal integrity put forward by Frankfurt and Williams by developing a more socially situated account of personal integrity that concerns one's relationship not to oneself but to the larger moral community. In Calhoun's view, the person of integrity stands for principles and values whose correct formulation and expression matter to the rest of us as well: “Integrity here seems tightly connected to viewing oneself as a member of an evaluating community and to caring about what that community endorses” (, 254). She explicitly criticizes artists who would abandon their own aesthetic judgment on the grounds that, in doing so, they fail to realize the ways in which their artistic judgment “matter[s] to others” (258). We need to make a similar move here. Having artistic integrity is a not merely a matter of being true to oneself as an artist, refusing to compromise one's own artistic standards, but is also a matter of honoring one's own aesthetic standards for the benefit of the larger community. Calhoun focuses on our relationship, as moral agents, to other moral agents, where the parallel would then be to the artist's relationship with other artists, but here the parallel between moral integrity and artistic integrity is inexact. For while we are all moral agents, all equally members of the moral community, we are not all artists. Thus, we need to consider the relationship of artists not only to fellow artists, who are also striving to develop and express their own artistic standards, but to their audience. Why might artistic integrity matter to them?

It is beyond the scope of this article to resolve the question of what art is for—what is its point? Why do we value it? Let me just assert baldly that we do. Philippa Foot, in her book Natural Goodness, writes,

Human societies depend on especially talented individuals playing special roles in a society's life. As some species of animals need a lookout, or as herds of elephants need an old she‐elephant to lead them to a watering hole, so human societies need leaders, explorers, and artists. Failure to perform a special role here can be a defect in a man or woman who is not ready to contribute what he or she alone—or best—can give. (, 44)

So we might need to add that artistic integrity involves taking this role seriously and not allowing one's performance of it to be compromised by extraneous and competing considerations and that, other things equal (which of course they never are), one has some obligation not to bury artistic talents in the ground or hide artistic lights under a bushel.

A corollary to this is that artistic integrity may require communal support, in particular, financial support for artists so they can create their art without compromising their artistic integrity. Foot goes on to say that if societies need individuals to perform certain vital social roles, they have to be willing to provide support for individuals in those roles: “There is also something wrong with the rest of us if we do not support those of genius, or even special talent, in their work” (, 44). While I am not sure how much special talent one must have to merit societal support for one's art, it does seem true that if we want artists to avoid selling out, we may need to support them in a way that they can make art without selling out. If we do not, arguably we have sold out as well. We also need to work together to alter social and political conditions that not only fail to support art but censor and even persecute those who create it. Damian Cox, Marguerite La Caze, and Michael Levine argue, “If integrity is as central and important a virtue as recent work on the topic suggests, then ideally the institutions—including forms of government and economic arrangements—that help shape our lives should be structured in ways that promote integrity” (), in this case, artistic integrity. The case of artists such as Dimitri Shostakovich, who admitted to making politically expedient artistic choices for his own survival under Stalin's regime, testify to terrible, even life‐threatening pressures on artists to abandon their integrity (see the discussion in Sutherland ). Here, however, it is not Shostakovich who primarily stands accused, but Stalin. Just as we distinguish between ordinary virtue and heroic virtue, we may distinguish between ordinary artistic integrity, maintained in the face of mundane, quotidian temptations, and heroic artistic integrity, where artists are willing to make extraordinary sacrifices—facing prison, torture, or “disappearance”—to continue to make their art as they believe it should be made.

As we consider what artists, as artists, owe to the larger community, we also need to consider the relationship, and possible tensions, between artistic integrity and moral integrity, between fidelity to one's own artistic commitments and standards and the living of a moral life. For the former may seem to come with costs for the latter. Commitment to one's art might lead one to neglect other moral requirements: for example, it might lead Gauguin to abandon his family to pursue his art in Tahiti; it might lead the artist to devote resources to his or her art rather than giving them to famine relief. Yet, as we saw above, artistic integrity should not be understood as requiring the artist to sacrifice all competing values—including moral values—for single‐minded, wholehearted devotion to art. Those who rush to do so reveal themselves to be not artists of exceptional integrity but human beings of exceptional indifference to morality.

Questions about the relationship between artistic integrity and attention to morality also arise in regard to the content of narrative artwork. Artists may advance immoral views through their artwork, the most famous example here being Leni Reifenstahl's Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will. By pursuing her own artistic vision in making the film, Reifenstahl produced a film that intentionally advanced the objectives of the Third Reich. She may have maintained her artistic integrity at the price of her moral integrity, if we accept my claim that it is difficult to ascribe moral integrity to those who act in blatantly immoral ways. To consider a contrasting kind of case, artists can compromise their artistic standards by trying too hard to impart even clearly moral messages in their art, by distorting their own artistic vision into a different kind of propaganda. (I see this temptation especially in those who create earnestly didactic books for children.) But I am also sympathetic to those who see the ethical properties of a work of art as aesthetic properties as well, who understand that “narrative artwork unavoidably engages, exercises, and sometimes clarifies and deepens moral understanding and the moral emotions” (Carroll , 154–155). Although “it is not the function of a narrative artwork to provide moral education,” one way in which an artist may seek to engage his audience is “by means of enlisting our moral understanding and emotions” (154). So it may be fully appropriate for an artist of integrity to devote attention to the ethical dimensions of his or her work, and to be judged not only as a moral agent but as an artist for failing to do so.

Even if there is room for artistic integrity and moral integrity to diverge, I would nonetheless claim that artistic integrity is a virtue, or excellence, in a person. Perhaps the best way of exhibiting the clear moral dimension to artistic integrity focuses on its relation to the morally charged concept of respect. The artist with artistic integrity has respect for his or her art, respect for himself or herself as an artist, and respect for his or her audience. Hill's cynical artist (considered above), churning out multiple copies of inferior work “to please the tasteless public” (, 19), lacks not only self‐respect, as Hill concludes, but respect for his audience as well. I would speculate that artists who lack artistic integrity almost invariably exhibit a lack of respect for their audience: they lower their artistic standards in order to pander to the presumed lower artistic standards of their audience. This is to treat one's audience with implied contempt, certainly a problematic moral attitude. Persons who act with artistic integrity, by contrast, not only give their best to their art, but at the same time give their best to their audience. Respect for oneself as an artist and respect for one's audience work together, rather than in tension with each other.

As I opened with Salinger, I will close with him as well, sharing the ending of Franny and Zooey. Throughout the novella, Franny has been consumed with angst over the phoniness and egoism of artists. Although she does not use the term, we could say she is railing against their lack of artistic integrity, which for her means that artists are focused on themselves, on gratifying their own ego, and not on something larger than themselves, on art for the sake of beauty, art for the sake of art, pursued with the goal of achieving a personal ideal of perfection. As her brother Zooey tells her, “An artist's only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else's” (, 199). (Note here the insistence that an artist be true to his or her own standards, rather than to some universally accepted measure of excellence.) But far from this entailing a disregard for audience, it means a heightened appreciation of audience, an abiding respect, even love, for an audience that is both idealized and made poignantly particular.

When, as gifted children, Franny and Zooey appeared on a weekly radio program, “It's a Wise Child,” their older brother Seymour would tell them to shine their shoes—even though their shoes would never be seen by their audience—and to shine them “for the Fat Lady,” an imagined member of that invisible audience. As adults, Franny and Zooey compare memories of their own constructed image of “the Fat Lady.” Fanny remembers that her imagined Fat Lady had “very thick legs, very veiny. I had her in an awful wicker chair. She had cancer, too, though, and she had the radio going full‐blast all day” (201). And then comes the final revelation: there is not anyone in any audience anywhere who is not the Fat Lady, that is, someone who deserves their best efforts as artists. Zooey asks Franny, “don't you know who that Fat Lady really is? … Ah, buddy. Ah, buddy. It's Christ Himself. Christ Himself, buddy” (202). Salinger's powerful conclusion brings together the artistic and the moral to provide a compelling portrait of artistic integrity grounded in respect both for oneself and for others.5

I have argued that artistic integrity requires non‐self‐deceptive adherence to the artist's own artistic standards, even in the face of competing pressures. I have also argued, however, that it does not require adamant refusal to acknowledge or act upon commitments to values other than single‐minded devotion to one's art. Artists of integrity need not be inflexible fanatics. They can seek to earn a living through their art, alter their vision of a work to reach an audience, evolve their artistic standards as they grow as artists, and balance the energy devoted to their art against energy devoted to family, friends, and self‐care; they can honor the demands of morality. But throughout, they must retain some fundamental respect for themselves as artists, for the work of art they create, and for their audience. As far as artistic integrity goes, Holden Caulfield is wrong; Zooey Glass is right. Or so I have argued.6

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Footnotes