Whose Hand Do You Prefer? The Steerability of Machine Aesthetic Judgment

When a model prefers one artwork over another, is it judging the work or the story attached to it? We place vision--language models as aesthetic judges and measure how far a forced-choice preference moves under a claim about authorship while the image is held fixed. Using hand-made works by a single practicing artist and machine images from a single generator, we present truthful, absent, and deliberately swapped attributions, and vary the prestige of the story told about the human maker. Across three open-weight judges, preference is strongly steerable: swapping the two works' labels cuts the human image's odds of being chosen roughly six-fold, while maker prestige exerts only a small, secondary pull. Steerability is not uniform, however. In a model $\times$ condition interaction ($\chi^2(4) = 781$, $p < 10^{-15}$) one judge barely moves when the label is falsified while another reverses almost completely. Seen through the theme of agency, the finding is this: whether a judge's preference follows the work or the context attached to it is a model-specific property rather than a shared trait, and where it follows the context, whoever writes that artwork's context controls the verdict.