You have in front of you two new artworks, they depict the same scene in different ways and you know nothing about the artists.

Would you be able to tell me that one is a superior piece of art?

If yes, can you tell me why it is superior, are there criteria I should look for or will you just point at one and announce that its superiority needs no explanation?

If you do just point, why should I take your word for it?

By all means (I think) some of these institutions are controled by clergy, indeed by the high clergy represented by a group like the USCCB, so their view wrt to those institutions is legit.  But my sense is that the state of facts on this is much less clear than the bishops’ high-octane public stance has suggested.  I don’t think we can assume that all “Catholic hospitals” (or universities or other institutions) are in fact controlled by the clergy (or the church), nor indeed that their controlling officials concur with the bishops in having a religious objection to including contraception in their health plans (I thought I read that Georgetown U. Law Center, eg. included it).

You would agree that this is a significant consideration, then?

I ultimately agree with this, because I think the value of art ultimately has to do with giving pleasure to people for whom it is made, kind of like Roger’s maxim of creating value for others (which has definitely been one of the more valuable ideas I’ve gained while hanging around here).

But I certainly think that appreciation for craft has its place: we should be aware of the work that has gone into creating the artifacts we encounter (not only artwork, though, which is part of why this isn’t a sufficient account of artistic value!).  I do think this recognition can enhance our actual experience of an artwork. Certainly it does for my experience of Pieta (which I’ve never had the pleasure of seeing in person) and of really fine performances of Baroque masterpieces such as the Barandenburg concertos I’ve seen on YouTube, and I think we have to assume it contributes to people’s enjoyment of the Sistine frescoes (also never seen).  Knowledge about the creation of a work can magnify our direct enjoyment of it.

But craft, effort, skill and difficulty aren’t ultimately the whole story of the artistic value of art. That’s just one side of the story. Art is meant to create an involuntary, naive response in the uninformed experiencer. The audience member should not need to appreciate the difficulty, effort, and skill of the work in order for the work to have its effect on her.  That is the business of the artist.  A work that consumed great effort and required great skill to create but that creates little direct response in an  observer uninformed about these things (uninformed as to the details of its creation, that is; enough familiarity with the works genre that the work potentially might move a person is required for judging its ability to do so) is ultimately of little value – or in any case two works that required the same high amount of effort to create are not of equal value if one moves many of those who experience it and another doesn’t.  Indeed, we might even say that people who appreciate art primarily on the basis of an assessment of the difficulty and execution of the creation (alternatively, the level of skill and effort that went into it) have unmoored their evaluation from the ultimate purpose of all art, which is to create a response in the experiencer, or else purely to express oneself (though ultimately nearly every artist, I belive is seeking to at least go beyond expression to communication of some sort, which then comes back to creating a response).  This is something that artists themselves rarely lose sight of – for them effort, craft, and skill merely happen to be the necessary means to (the necessary means for…) their end of expression, communication, or creation, and “level of difficulty” an incidental quantity that is simply a function of the requirements of the creation itself.

Moving people, though, that is much closer to my view of the purpose of art.  Maybe right on the money, in fact. (My previous attempt was that the ultimate purpose was to provide pleasure [often experienced as ex post facto appreciation of a work's expansion of or contribution to the richness of one's overall set of experiences and sensations in life, or in recognition of meaning or insight that has been gained by experiencing the work, but in other cases experienced directly as pleasure] that makes life more livable by softening or giving relief from the unpleasantness that the necessary parts of life impose on us.) I think I’m marginally still with my previous attempt, but “moving people” is certainly simpler, and works more or less just as well analytically.

Edit

What could possibly go wrong?