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Quality in the arts
#11
RE: Quality in the arts
There IS a quantifiable scale of a what of a work of art is worth.


How much will you pay?


Get snobby and pitch a hissy fit all you like, it doesn't change the fact that great works of art bring great amounts of money.

To complain that artists rarely get rich, and should be subsdidfized by the government totally missed the point of great art. Great art comes about when the artist does what he does for the sake of the art and not for a paycheck. That story of the artists suffering is what makes a work of art worth more than an identical forgery - which was done strictly for the money

When art is subsidized, usually by government - you end up with second or third rate shit. The IKEA of art. Stuff that looks like, but isn't quite art.
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#12
RE: Quality in the arts
(October 13, 2018 at 11:36 am)onlinebiker Wrote: There IS a quantifiable scale of a what of a work of art is worth.


How much will you pay?


Get snobby and pitch a hissy fit all you like, it doesn't change the fact that great works of art bring great amounts of money.

To complain that artists rarely get rich, and should be subsdidfized by the government totally missed the point of great art. Great art comes about when the artist does what he does for the sake of the art and not for a paycheck. That story of the artists suffering is what makes a work of art worth more than an identical forgery - which was done strictly for the money

When art is subsidized, usually by government - you end up with second or third rate shit. The IKEA of art. Stuff that looks like, but isn't quite art.

Most of the great works of art in history have been subsidized.  Here are a few examples:

https://100swallows.files.wordpress.com/...nting1.jpg

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/c...A12732.jpg

https://www.icsydney.com.au/sites/defaul...k=ClyPJIa0

https://cdn.britannica.com/s:700x450/86/...23E561.jpg

For contrast, here are some UNsubsidized works.

https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/image...MPoiIW2qTA

https://cdn.britannica.com/42/175342-004-9F3C4ADE.jpg

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/c...ection.jpg

https://images.bluethumb.com.au/uploads/...93a9cf448d

What is your dividing line between 'art' and 'isn't quite art'?

Boru
‘But it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods or no gods. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.’ - Thomas Jefferson
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#13
RE: Quality in the arts
(October 13, 2018 at 11:36 am)onlinebiker Wrote: Get snobby and pitch a hissy fit all you like, it doesn't change the fact that great works of art bring great amounts of money.
Works of art that the majority finds worth great amounts of money, bring great amounts of money. 

In response to the OP, I don't really agree. For me personally, some of the beauty of art (in any form) lies in not having to work with rigid definitions and labels, and everything being open to interpretation. There are as many stories in a piece of art as there are people trying to find a story in it. Trying to decide superiority in art will be based on everyone's personal interpretation of that art. If we're trying to decide whether Dan Brown or Proust has better work, we'd be mentally rating it based on several parameters. But the 'score' each work of art would receive on each parameter would depend on how we interpret that aspect of the art. 
For string made of two different materials, however, if superiority were to be decided by, say, tensile strength (the higher the better), one material would clearly and inarguably come out on top. That's not true for art.
The word bed actually looks like a bed. 
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#14
RE: Quality in the arts
(October 13, 2018 at 10:08 am)Thoreauvian Wrote: 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.  

Yes, I think so too. I once had a friendly chat with a German guy sitting in the Metropolitan Museum. He was facing the Rembrandts and I was facing the Vermeers, and each of us tried to convince the other that his favorite was better. I was young and starting from zero. It was a provocative experience. 

So I don't want to posit some absolute hierarchy of qualities, in which originality (say) always beats out depth of allusion. Still, I think that both of these qualities counts in favor of a given work. 

(That said, we have to be careful when we talk about the artist's "goals." She may have failed at her goal and accomplished something else which is still good, or she might have lied about her stated goal, etc. But I take your meaning, that different works do different things.)

Quote:So for instance, Marvel movies work better as entertainments than most Oscar-worthy productions which are trying to embody some truth about humanity.

Well, I'm more cynical than you are. I think that Oscar-winning movies are also entertainments, organized by a corporation to win Oscars, and are almost always "fake deep." The truth -- or pretense of truth -- that they are after is designed to appeal to audiences. 

Here, too, though, I see what you're saying. Marvel movies are good at what they do, and only the worst otaku-types would claim they are meant to be deep. 

I think I want to argue that the qualities of good entertainment, if we spell them out, will be seen to be low-level qualities. Fun at the moment, but if that is all that art could do then all art would become close to brainless. 

So, let's propose some qualities of purely-for-entertainment consumer products. Not challenging to one's beliefs. (In fact, subtly reinforcing the audience's ideology is helpful for entertainment.) Clever as opposed to intelligent. 99% familiar to the target audience, with just enough added flair (usually visual, in the form of CGI) to give a variation. 

So fine for Netflix and chill, but the sum of the qualities can't be held up as a superior product to more challenging works. 

Quote: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.

Yes, this is important, I'm glad you wrote this. 

There is good children's art and good adult's art. I find Harry Potter to be a skillful but boring combination of clichés, but my nieces and nephews grew up with the books and hadn't experienced the clichés anywhere else. For them, it was new. There are also cases where symbolic teaching takes place for messages that kids do well to learn. The most popular cartoon for infants in Japan is about a personified cake-boy, who makes people happy by sharing himself. The "bad guy" is germ-man. 

One thing that bothers me about corporate productions is that it expects its audiences to remain infants. Star Trek is great when you're in Jr. High school, but jeez. 

The notion that there is demonstrable better and worse is important to me in part because I think people do well to recognize what's better, and graduate to those things. (Not every minute; we all need to switch off sometimes. But overall.) 

Quote: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.

I very much agree with this. And I think that active learning about quality allows us to enjoy more and more types of art as we get older. [/quote]
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#15
RE: Quality in the arts
(October 13, 2018 at 7:51 pm)Belaqua Wrote: I think I want to argue that the qualities of good entertainment, if we spell them out, will be seen to be low-level qualities. Fun at the moment, but if that is all that art could do then all art would become close to brainless. 

So, let's propose some qualities of purely-for-entertainment consumer products. Not challenging to one's beliefs. (In fact, subtly reinforcing the audience's ideology is helpful for entertainment.) Clever as opposed to intelligent. 99% familiar to the target audience, with just enough added flair (usually visual, in the form of CGI) to give a variation. 

So fine for Netflix and chill, but the sum of the qualities can't be held up as a superior product to more challenging works. 

I am so unused to agreeing with you that I'm at a bit of a loss. So I will just add one more point.

I recently attended a family barbeque in which the 53-year-old husband of my wife's niece discussed with the 70-year-old sister-in-law of my wife exactly how dinosaurs fit into the Bible account in Genesis. They were both completely serious, and both completely missed the point that the Genesis stories were mythology rather than factual. My wife's sister-in-law concluded that the Bible was obviously written to make people think!

The point is I realized these entirely normal grownups had no intellectual horizons to speak of. You may say they are a product of what you criticize, and you may have a point. But I can't help but wonder whether they were simply incurious, and no amount of exposure to anything better would help them in any way. After all, they likely had the same kinds of opportunities I had in my lifetime.
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#16
RE: Quality in the arts
(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?

[/quote]

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.
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#17
RE: Quality in the arts
There would have to be universally agreed-upon standards for every genre / form in the arts. 
Never gonna happen. 

Is ABBA's "Fernando" better than or of less quality Mozart's "Requiem" ? 

LOL
Every religion is true one way or another. It is true when understood metaphorically. But when it gets stuck in its own metaphors, interpreting them as facts, then you are in trouble. - Joseph Campbell  Popcorn

Militant Atheist Commie Evolutionist 
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#18
RE: Quality in the arts
(October 13, 2018 at 11:36 am)onlinebiker Wrote: There IS a quantifiable scale of a what of a work of art is worth.


How much will you pay?

Here is a good example of how, in my view, aesthetic issues are like ethical ones. 

If all ethical issues were determined by financial standards, things would be simpler. But I don't think any of us here would find this to be a good system. 

It's important for us to think about values that don't depend on money, especially since our culture is so deeply money-oriented. 

Quote:Get snobby and pitch a hissy fit all you like, it doesn't change the fact that great works of art bring great amounts of money.

It's true that great works go for high prices. I'm not against that, especially if some of them end up in museums. (Tax policy can encourage this.) 

The complication is that some works which aren't great also go for huge amounts of money. And part of what I want to do here is think about standards by which we can say, "that was expensive, but it's also bad." 

Not to get all Marxist on you, but there is a difference between the intrinsic value of an object (use-value, if we're talking about non-art-objects) and exchange value (what it goes for in the market). In modern capitalism these things are often wildly unrelated. 

Quote:To complain that artists rarely get rich, and should be subsdidfized by the government totally missed the point of great art.

I don't mind if artists get rich. Whether the government should subsidize them is a separate issue -- I'm not really sure. 

Quote:Great art comes about when the artist does what he does for the sake of the art and not for a paycheck.

This is probably true. Motivations other than financial are certainly necessary. 

But again, the artist's private motivation isn't something that's intrinsic in the artwork, by which we can say if it's good or not. I'm wanting to talk about aesthetic quality.

Quote:That story of the artists suffering is what makes a work of art worth more than an identical forgery - which was done strictly for the money

This gets tricky. A fake may have artistic quality, in that it possesses the same qualities as its original. 

Here we get in to a grey area: to what extent the aesthetic quality of the work is derived from facts not in the work itself. For example, provenance adds exchange value. If a teacup was used by a Chinese emperor, the exchange value goes way up, even if it's not such a beautiful cup. I have sympathy for this, as all artworks have an "aura" which is part of the experience. 

The fact that van Gogh really did paint a work, really did suffer over it, really did give it to his friend, etc., lends the object itself some emotional quality. A fake doesn't have that. But a good fake may be as good-looking as a bad van Gogh. I'm not sure about all this. 

(There was a Japanese potter who was told that a guy down the hill from him was faking his works. He was happy about this, as he said that in the future when they were both dead, all of his bad pots would be attributed to the faker, and all the faker's good pots would be attributed to him.) 

Quote:When art is subsidized, usually by government - you end up with second or third rate shit. The IKEA of art. Stuff that looks like, but isn't quite art.

Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Largely it depends on the government. When Florence was governed by the Medici, it got some great stuff. 

If our current government is commissioning bad stuff, I blame both the politicians and the artists. And I think our current tendency to think "It's all subjective" may be partly to blame here.
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#19
RE: Quality in the arts
(October 13, 2018 at 12:18 pm)DodosAreDead Wrote: For me personally, some of the beauty of art (in any form) lies in not having to work with rigid definitions and labels, and everything being open to interpretation. There are as many stories in a piece of art as there are people trying to find a story in it.

Yes, very much. 

In fact, I think that what you write here may constitute a kind of criterion by which we can describe the quality of a work. For example, a story which rigidly adheres to the rules of its genre, to the point where there are no surprises, might well deserve less attention. A work which prompts many strong and suggestive interpretations is likely a wonderful work. 

In my opinion, the Book of Job is this way, among many others. Its "real meaning" is ambiguous, if there even is a real meaning. But the text plus all the interpretations we have down the years forms a wonderful thing to spend time on. 

A book in which the author's meaning is rigidly clear, which we must only interpret in one way, might well be too simple. 

Quote:Trying to decide superiority in art will be based on everyone's personal interpretation of that art. If we're trying to decide whether Dan Brown or Proust has better work, we'd be mentally rating it based on several parameters. But the 'score' each work of art would receive on each parameter would depend on how we interpret that aspect of the art. 

Again, a strong yes from me. 

I don't mean to indicate that there will be an eternal and universal hierarchy of qualities which will lead us to indisputable numerical judgments. There are any number of qualities we look for and wonderful works may have different combinations of these. I can argue that a 19th century novel shows me how real people in those days thought about their lives. And I can argue that Flaubert's Temptation of St. Anthony is wonderful even though none of the characters is the least bit realistic. 

Still, there are articulable reasons as to why these works are worth our time. It is far more than just "I like what I like and you like what you like and it's all equal." 

Quote:For string made of two different materials, however, if superiority were to be decided by, say, tensile strength (the higher the better), one material would clearly and inarguably come out on top. That's not true for art.

I'd say it is true for art, with the obvious difference that tensile strength can be measured and quantified. In a novel, if superiority is to be judged on only one criterion, then judgments would be simpler. But you are right that we don't judge them by only one criterion, because there are other qualities we value. Thank goodness, good artworks are more complicated than that.

There are varying criteria for string too, though, right? If you're wrapping a birthday present, you use string that's pretty. If you're tying up your girlfriend for special playtime, you use jute string that's too rough to slip and tighten up the knots uncomfortably -- tensile strength wouldn't be so important, unless you're doing the whole ceiling suspension thing. And that's kind of advanced.

(October 13, 2018 at 9:06 pm)Bucky Ball Wrote: There would have to be universally agreed-upon standards for every genre / form in the arts. 
Never gonna happen. 

Is ABBA's "Fernando" better than or of less quality Mozart's "Requiem" ? 

LOL

I have already said that I don't believe objective judgments demand universal criteria. If you have an argument to demonstrate that they do, I'll read it.
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#20
RE: Quality in the arts
(October 13, 2018 at 10:48 pm)Belaqua Wrote: Yes, very much. 

In fact, I think that what you write here may constitute a kind of criterion by which we can describe the quality of a work. For example, a story which rigidly adheres to the rules of its genre, to the point where there are no surprises, might well deserve less attention. A work which prompts many strong and suggestive interpretations is likely a wonderful work. 

In my opinion, the Book of Job is this way, among many others. Its "real meaning" is ambiguous, if there even is a real meaning. But the text plus all the interpretations we have down the years forms a wonderful thing to spend time on. 

A book in which the author's meaning is rigidly clear, which we must only interpret in one way, might well be too simple. 
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. 
(October 13, 2018 at 10:48 pm)Belaqua Wrote: I don't mean to indicate that there will be an eternal and universal hierarchy of qualities which will lead us to indisputable numerical judgments. There are any number of qualities we look for and wonderful works may have different combinations of these. I can argue that a 19th century novel shows me how real people in those days thought about their lives. And I can argue that Flaubert's Temptation of St. Anthony is wonderful even though none of the characters is the least bit realistic. 

Still, there are articulable reasons as to why these works are worth our time. It is far more than just "I like what I like and you like what you like and it's all equal." 
I don't mean to say that every single thing about art is relative, as you've proven with the 19th century novel example. 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. 
Define "wonderful".
Worth our time is again relative. It simply depends on how much value each person gleans from that art.

(October 13, 2018 at 10:48 pm)Belaqua Wrote: I'd say it is true for art, with the obvious difference that tensile strength can be measured and quantified. In a novel, if superiority is to be judged on only one criterion, then judgments would be simpler. But you are right that we don't judge them by only one criterion, because there are other qualities we value. Thank goodness, good artworks are more complicated than that.

There are varying criteria for string too, though, right? If you're wrapping a birthday present, you use string that's pretty. If you're tying up your girlfriend for special playtime, you use jute string that's too rough to slip and tighten up the knots uncomfortably -- tensile strength wouldn't be so important, unless you're doing the whole ceiling suspension thing. And that's kind of advanced.

I didn't mean to say that string can be judged on just one criterion and art can't be, but that 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.
The word bed actually looks like a bed. 
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