(October 13, 2018 at 11:21 pm)DodosAreDead Wrote: Well, in a way, I guess we could quantify based on the average number of ways each person interprets the art, but that's prone to participant variables. A lot of people (including myself, to some extent) look at art superficially.
That's natural. Nobody can be a connoisseur in every field. I will argue that connoisseurs have better judgment in their field than the rest of us, just because they have more knowledge about it.
Part of the issue here -- not with you in particular, but the reason that people reject the idea of knowable criteria in art -- is the American mistrust of expertise, and parallel insistence on democracy even when it's not warranted. If all judgment is just preference, then no one has to admit that he has bad taste.
Quote:But for one work of art to definitively come out on top, there need to be several such. And even then, everyone has the right to say "but for some inexplicable reason, THIS work of art appeals to me far more than this", and no one can argue with that.
Again, I'm not saying that one work of art has to definitively come out on top. There is a limit to the precision of our judgments, and it's not as precise as it is in science, usually. I still don't understand why people assume that "objective" always implies some sort of universal eternal and quantifiable rating system.
Quote:Define "wonderful".
Worth our time is again relative. It simply depends on how much value each person gleans from that art.
Again, we can make a list of objective adjectives about a given work. OK, we can't hold up some scientific formula to prove that one is more worthy of our time than others. But we can make objective sentences like these:
1) If you spend two hours watching Spiderman IX while drinking a beer in your underwear, you will feel relaxed at the end, and you will experience a cliched unoriginal story that keeps your attention mostly through motion and noise, which flatters the audience through assumptions about who is good, reinforces unthinking ideology about violence and simplistic approaches to life, and leaves all of the viewers' self-satisfied blindness unchanged.
2) If you spend two hours on a close reading of Dante's Purgatorio, there is a good chance that you will be led to a more detailed understanding of both Greek and Christian ideas of morality and your place in the world. You will learn why many of your current assumptions are not as solid as you thought they were. You will gain, through the symbolism, a new set of emotional tools with which to ponder important things in your own life.
I think both of those sentences can be argued for conclusively. Can I prove that #2 is better than #1 through some empirical scientific test? No. But those are things that I mean by "wonderful" and "worthwhile." If you want to argue that #1 is more worthwhile (and not just something that's normal to do when you're sleepy) you could try an objective argument.
Quote:there are many quantifiable ways to judge string. although some, such as 'pretty' will still be relative, of course.
Bold mine: that makes all the difference.
And I'm sticking with my view that objectivity doesn't require quantifiability.
