Art in decadence?

[Belacqua]

subjective but they are not arbitrary

Well I’m sure that everyone is eagerly awaiting my opinion on the subjective/objective thing. (Not.) 

But as you can tell this subject is of particular interest to me, so I’m going to type out my thoughts anyway. Those who dislike what I have to say are urged to ignore the following. 

So, first we can define "objective" as that which is “not influenced by personal feelings or opinions in considering and representing facts.” (Top definition on Google.) So “2+2=4” is an objective statement, in that once we all agree on what the symbols mean the truth of the statement is not influenced by our feelings. 

“Subjective” is “based on or influenced by personal feelings, tastes, or opinions.” But I am going to quibble here with the word “personal.” Because very few people, if any, have feelings or tastes that are wholly personal to themselves. Our feelings are formed in many different ways, which I am going to categorize roughly as 1) nature, and 2) nurture. 

So for example, it’s sometimes said that the women men find beautiful are the ones who look like they’re capable of healthy child-bearing. Naturally there are exceptions (and I’m not saying it’s what I recommend) but the connection between what we find attractive and our DNA-determined evolutionary tastes seems believable. 

There is also a theory that the arts are extensions, made beyond utility, of faculties and abilities we have because of their evolutionary advantages. So for example healthy agile people who can jump really high have an advantage in escaping from tigers, and it’s these abilities, taken beyond their original function, which make ballet attractive to us. 

Our natural abilities to detect patterns and to distinguish subtle shades of color, which help us find food and avoid being eaten, likewise form the base of all the visual arts. 

Work comes from lack, and play from abundance. So when we develop a society with enough abundance that we no longer have to use all our faculties for survival, then these same abilities extend themselves into play — which is art. 

But since, as human beings, we have a fairly consistent range of abilities and faculties, it is likely that what we enjoy and find beautiful will also fall into a fairly consistent set. This is not strictly decided, of course, because there will be lots of individual variation — I’m only saying that from our evolutionary history we are likely to have consistencies and regularities in what we find attractive. Maybe nearly everybody will find a ballet dancer who jumps, spins, and lands lightly on his feet will be more pleasing to us than one who falls on his head and breaks his skull. And maybe this has something to do with the abilities that give people evolutionary advantages. 

So pleasures which are subjective (including the pleasures of the arts) are likely to fall within the range which normal human beings tend to have. 

Nonetheless, all of these natural tendencies (not rules) may be affected or even contradicted by nurture. And of course when we’re talking about tastes in art or in what we find appealing, “nurture” refers to customs, traditions, societal norms which are impressed on us from the time we’re born. There have been times in history when men found unhealthy-looking women more attractive. There were times when Chinese men found bound feet sexy, and Japanese men liked women who blackened their teeth.  

But every human being who has ever lived to adulthood has lived in a society, which means that no one’s taste is purely personal and unaffected by the norms and tastes of his or her time. So subjectivity has its limits here. When I choose that I like one thing more than another the choice is rarely made in a vacuum. From baby-hood we are influenced by our culture’s tastes. And this can change surprisingly fast — fashions that looked hot and sexy from the 1970s often look comical today. (Old videos from 70s game shows like Hollywood Squares, for example, look to me as if the men are dressed like clowns.) 

These two reasons — nature and nurture — are why “subjective” doesn’t mean “arbitrary.” As in the earlier example of ice skating, for example, there is no purely objective quantum to determine what is beautiful and what isn’t on the ice. But there are many years and many traditions which lead experienced skaters and judges to make judgements which are far more than personal whim. 

Likewise with painting. No one looks at paintings with a purely innocent mind. We bring our influences to the museum with us, whether we’re aware of them or not. Very original art may look ugly at first but, if it has qualities that aren’t visible right away, it can eventually persuade enough people that it really is worth looking at, and eventually it will move the window of acceptable art in a new direction. 

As an example, we can note that one of the very first people to appreciate the originality of Picasso and Matisse was Leo Stein, Gertrude’s brother. Leo was a student of Bernard Berenson, the great scholar of Renaissance art. Bernard and Leo had worked out a set of qualities to look for when judging good-quality Renaissance paintings from bad ones. These are not objective laws — more like a checklist of things to notice, including tactile values, vitality, the grouping of masses, and other visual things like that. They are subjective in that people can disagree on whether one painting has them better than another, but for these connoisseurs they formed a set of consistent qualities which, according to their long experience, made a painting more successful. The point here is that when Leo went to visit his sister in Paris he noticed that despite the differences in surface appearance between Picasso and Raphael, the newer painter was making sophisticated use of the qualities which Berenson had identified in Renaissance art. So Leo’s positive judgment of Picasso, while not scientifically provable, was far from arbitrary. And I think this has stood the test of time, in that people with experience still find it easy to see why Picasso is superior to the many many Picasso-imitators who began to appear almost immediately. 

So “subjective” qualities can’t be proven by math or science, but that doesn’t mean they float around in a vacuum with no roots in nature and culture.