RE: Quality in the arts
October 13, 2018 at 10:08 am
(This post was last modified: October 13, 2018 at 10:34 am by Alan V.)
(October 13, 2018 at 12:59 am)Belaqua Wrote: In case you're not getting enough of the endless debate about objective morality, I think there's a similar fight we could have in the Arts section.
I'm leaning toward the conclusion that it's possible to make objective statements of quality in aesthetic matters. I think if we say, for example, "Proust's books are better than Dan Brown's," that may be a truth-statement and not just a preference-statement.
Granted, there will still be times when you'd choose to read The da Vinci Code instead of À la recherche du temps perdu. Like if you were in an airport, you'd just taken three Ativan tablets, and your ex-wife was a Proust scholar. But those are local and contingent reasons, and Proust is still of higher quality.
Any arguments pro or con? In part, I think aesthetic questions are similar to ethics questions, in how we approach them.
I have been thinking about art since I considered trying to become a professional artist when I was a teenager. I think it is only possible to talk about "better" or "worse" in art in relationship to the specific goal the artist wanted to achieve. Since art has many different possible goals, as is illustrated by the contrast between the Michelangelo and the Rodin sculptures, you have to qualify what you say for each artistic work.
So for instance, Marvel movies work better as entertainments than most Oscar-worthy productions which are trying to embody some truth about humanity.
Further, there is also the question of who is seeing the art. Some young person may find the ideas expressed in even a Marvel movie to be new and interesting, whereas an older and regular movie-watcher may be habituated to and jaded about even the best of the best.
My bottom-line assessment is that there are times and places for a diversity of art forms, because of the above and other, similar considerations.
