Is art subjective?

[bennyboy]

You can clearly have objective measures of art-- but the definition of art is then arbitrary. For example, "Art is that which causes the strongest sense of longing" could be followed by the laboratory identification of brain regions/patterns which viewers associate with the feeling they call "longing," and then people could be made to look at a lot of things to determine which artifacts most strongly activate those brain regions and patterns.

But then some guy will come along and say, "This thing here doesn't invoke any particularly longing, but it clearly deserves to be called art," and fucks things up by bringing mind back into the scientific study of mind. The next day will be even worse: the brain researchers will fight back by writing a wikipedia article "proving" beauty is a triggering of X-function in the Y-lobe of the brain. Then when I point out how beautiful a sunset is, every prick in every forum in the world will call me a n00b, and link this definitive proof that beauty has nothing to do with beauty.


Let me try my own definition of beauty: "That which elicits emotions for which no combination of words is a sufficient description-- or which makes me horny."