(October 13, 2018 at 10:49 am)Jörmungandr Wrote: I'd say that there are objective differences which people base their aesthetic preferences upon, but it's not necessarily true that there are objective aesthetic facts. It is supposed that people evolved to find certain human physical traits more appealing than others, because mating with people who possessed those traits lead to more and healthier offspring, and those judgements are projected onto our aesthetic sense when it comes to visual stimuli. I suppose a similar argument could be made about other aesthetic judgements, that they likely trace back to evolved preferences. So one could argue the case, and if one argues morality similarly, then there is a parallell there. However, many moral realists argue that it goes beyond the question of evolved moral preferences to acknowledgement of facts which are objectively true about the world. I don't think you could make a similar argument about aesthetic sense as easily.
I certainly believe that our aesthetic sense has its roots in the way we evolved. What we find attractive to mate selection or for survival may well be the primitive origin of all our preferences. As with morality, however, I think that modern people must have outgrown this.
Ethics may have got their start with a sense of empathy or negotiation for mutual benefit, but they are past that now. The possibilities of moral responsibility to people for whom we feel no empathy, or in which we personally derive no benefit are too clear in modern ethics. Likewise in aesthetics, even the strictest Freudian wouldn't claim that the pursuit of the best art is about making babies.
And partly for these reasons, I am thinking that our preferences in art aren't necessarily the way we determine quality in art. In other words, "I like it" doesn't necessarily mean "it's of high quality."
Maybe a thought experiment: if you had a lot more money, for collecting art with, I suppose you would buy stuff you like. (I know I would.) But at the same time, you wouldn't necessarily claim that this was the highest quality art in the world. In terms of sculpture, for example, I'm happy to say that Michelangelo's David is of a very high quality. But if the Italian government gave it to me I would quickly sell it and buy a whole bunch of Chinese porcelain.
Quote:Aside from that there is the question of how art shapes the standards of art. The King James bible was a standard of literature for centuries because of its religious content. As a consequence, various aspects of the work have become standard bearers for literary excellence and beauty, but would we have the same reaction if it had not been arbitrarily held forth as a literary masterwork? Forces both within and outside the artistic community work to promote certain aesthetics and to diminish others. It's hard to see that side of aesthetic preference as anything but cultural and subjective.
Yes, I think so too. Art styles and art preferences operate in dialectic. They are not independent of all the other values in a given society.
[I might disagree with you that the King James Bible was a standard of literature only because of its religious content. It's also a fantastic piece of writing! Granted, the fact that it was assigned reading helped its popularity.]
Quote:It's said that we fixate on certain styles of music during our adolescence, yet the music we listen to during adolescence is driven by many factors which often eclipse the aesthetic. Can a person say they have any kind of objectivity about musical taste given this phenomena? And what does it mean that we do fixate in this way? Is it possible that our visual tastes also have a critical period during which they are formed? Our literary tastes?
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Here, too, I want to think about the difference between our likes and tastes, versus quality. As I said in the OP, there can be all kinds of local and contingent reasons why we choose to read or listen to stuff. I will always have a place in my heart for Elvis Costello, for example.
It's said that we all have "comfort food," which we eat for emotional reasons. In this case I'm embarrassed even to say what my personal examples are, because they are the worst kinds of junk.
But I don't think that rules out more objective judgments. And I think that as we learn about standards of quality that weren't available to us in adolescence, we do ourselves a great benefit. Here too, there may be a dialectic that takes time. We hear something new in music we're unfamiliar with, we take the time to learn about its objective qualities, it begins to grow on us, and the interaction of knowledge and exposure allows us to love new things in a deep way.
