Has to be either beautiful or at least interesting from a certain perspective. I'm very suspicious of Art that is not one thing or another, but alludes to being either or both.

 

Do you find Mozart beautiful and the atonal folks more on the interesting side?

 

Is There an Underlying Value You Look To Satisfy In Your Evaluation of Art?
Uhh, no; am I supposed to get one? :lol:

Basically, this sounds like "If the art reinforces my own opinion of what I think art should be, then it's good."

There's no mystery left in that attitude; it's all determined by the viewer's own ideas about what art is supposed to be.

Where is "the receptive?"

It is not his task to try to lead-that would only make him lose the way-but to let himself be led. If he knows how to meet fate with an attitude of acceptance, he is sure to find the right guidance. The superior man lets himself be guided; he does not go ahead blindly, but learns from the situation what is demanded of him and then follows this intimation from fate.

 

You don't have to have one, I see nothing wrong with taking the mystery out of it and discovering what it is that is important to me in Art.

 

Actually I don't spend much time consciously "evaluating" art. I just take it in for whatever pleasure it can afford me. I'll probably, at some level of awareness, form some judgment of its quality, but unless I'm writing a review or an analysis or have some other need to critique its qualities I'm much more concerned simply with the emotional and intellectual experience of taking it in.

 

I ask an intellectually based question, does this appeal to me? If it does, I have a positive reaction and can break down the different aspects of it that I enjoy.

 

edited and deleted.

 

No. There was a time when I did this, when I had grand ideas about some underlying unifying principle that marked all great art, but since then I've come to like such an enormously broad spectrum of art that I find it impossible to think of any underlying principle or standard that they all possess. It ultimately just comes down to what moves me emotionally and intellectually, and I don't think there's any unifying principle for art that manages to do that.

 

I look for beauty or wisdom. If something is neither, it better be functionally indispensable for human life. Garbage cans for example are (usually) neither beautiful, nor convey wisdom, but are useful.
Then there is some music that is not beautiful... so basically does nothing.

My philosophy considers "final satisfaction", where you proudly sit down and do nothing, and as a result can do whatever you like, because nothing matters---impossible---because the only way everything is relative to me, is being good or bad relatively to something else.

In fact, I don't really have the concept of "whatever".

 

It should satisfy me in some way and go on doing so. What this involves is hard to articulate - I am actually not even aware of it really - and it can satisfy in many different ways. But with familiar periods and artists I am quite good at recognising the potential before I am fully acquainted with a piece. With books I find that the works I really value live on in my head so I can remember scenes and characters years later. Such books need time which is something I often only have in spurts. But I have found that I can put down the books I really value and pick them up again months later to continue where I left off with no loss of memory for what went before. There are other books I enjoy - Le Carre, Mankell, Ambler and others - but they are easy (if still intelligent) fast reads and I often forget a lot of them fairly quickly. It may be the same with music but I know a lot more music and tend not to bother with the easy type very much.

 

Art that unfolds for us in time--literature, film, music--for me resonates best by interspersing "cusp" experiences with interludes of then savoring the new paths that each cusp experience has set me upon. Cusps are those times within the unfolding of the piece when we are conscious of the art seizing us and rapidly accelerating us toward a perhaps somewhat expected but never fully predictable change of direction, theme, intensity, tempo, character.

With Art that presents itself as a single entity in a very short period of time--painting, sculpture--I experience either the portrayal of the cusp, or of the contemplation of the path that the art is portraying between postulated cusps. Quiet yet numinous landscape painting falls into that latter category; many well-known paintings by Van Gogh would fall into the former.

 

In my view music is intuitive art. I can't explain it, but I feel it.
For example, for me:
Bad music - Beethoven String Quartet in F Major Op. 59 No. 1.
Good music - Dittersdorf String Quartet No.1 D Major

 

Interesting! I thoroughly enjoy both of those!

 

I want it to make me forget anything else exists.

 

"Is There an Underlying Value You Look To Satisfy In Your Evaluation of Art?

Yes. I want it to be good.

 

Here's a pretty complete answer for my own criteria...

(1) Expressed Emotional Conviction

Any emotional expression(s), (not just "pathos" or "serious" expressions). EXPRESSED conviction is ultimately what gives it value/makes it compelling.

(all the intentions in the world dont matter if they werent expressed in the work)

(2) Expressed Conceptual Significance

Any concept EXPRESSED. This is basically an idea or vision (or alike descriptors) being conveyed (as opposed to an expression that is more "emotive"). Again, the significance or conviction expressed about it in the work itself is, ultimately, what gives it value/makes it compelling.

(3) Ingenuity (or "Creativity")

This is basically how singular and extraordinary the artist's idiom is (think the likes of Beethoven and Wagner for two supreme examples). This, probably, in an ultimate state, could be: did the artist express him or her SELF so closely to his/her individualistic nature, impetus or creative purpose that replicating it is virtually impossible and thus remains permanently singular relative to the history of Art?

------------

All 3 factors above are interdependant upon each other to reach the highest states of art.

Ultimately, I look for what could be called "depth".

An ideal statement of depth could be described as follows:

Exhibiting emotional or conceptual content with extraordinary conviction and singular creativity so as to permanently distinguish itself.

So that is my answer.

That taken into account, my rankings of "Best/Greatest" tend to be determined by my assessment of:

Accumulation of the degree and consistency of expressed emotional conviction, conceptual significance and ingenuity, throughout the time frame of the work and as a whole.

 

The best art reminds me of feelings that would break Mount Everest in half if I externalized them. Something from an entirely other life. That's how it is with Alexander Borodin and his Polovtsian Dances.

 

For me, it has to fit my arbitrary appraisal of being high standard Art; Art that holds itself to what I feel are very high standards of class, intelligence and execution of the works.

No offense to you and certainly no personal insult intended but I could never think this way. To me this means if it is satisfying or entertaining or fun or anything else it may not "fit" because it doesn't meet some high falutin' standard.

I am nearly 70 and one thing I've learned over five decades with music is time is short and have fun and be happy while doing it. If you're not having fun it isn't worth the effort, in my opinion. And trying to figure out if something meets some impossibly high standard doesn't seem like fun to me.

One reason I think this way is I do not need music to meet any need for me other than intellectual stimulation and fun. I read all the time about people that say they gain spiritual strength or emotional fulfillment from music. I don't; I get that elsewhere in life. I need art to entertain and to help me think about things perhaps differently than I did before.

 

No, what meets that standard I laid out in the OP is fun to me.

 

Now that you've got me thinking about it, it appears I have no standards whatsoever.

I had always suspected as much.

 

Loads and loads of underlying values! There's no way I could even hope to become conscious of all of them.

 

The underlying value of art for some listeners are the intangibles that cannot be weighed or measured. It’s beyond it.

 

Oh, yes! I enjoy interrupting the immediate satisfaction of listening to music or admiring a painting to have a philosophical discussion with myself to determine whether I really should be enjoying said art.

 

Everyone has their own way, no need to roll your eyes.

 

I have a hunch that Art and its values are not as intangible as we may think (or like to think). I love analyzing film, music, poetry, and paintings: anything that made me experience or feel something, to understand why or how these magicians in Art were able to manipulate me. I've also read Plato on this subject. It's all in the rhetoric. That is why I'm so interested in technique, and translating it to more intangible emotions and ideas. Is the "spirituality" in Bach inherent in the music or contrived? I'd argue it is all contrived. It doesn't matter that he is a devote Lutheran, and probably believed what he wrote would speak to God, or whether it affects us in that way. He succeeded in getting the point across, and more: making us (or some of us) look beyond or feel something external. That is why I say Art is all manipulation, we are all suckers and can't help it. That is why I'm so against critics that are artificial (in my view) to keep drawing some unwarranted connections as if Art has a life of its own.

 

I agree all Art is manipulation, but to bring it back around to the main topic, I was analyzing before the experience of the piece. I need to experience and then analyze.

 

My art has to be absolutely clear and totally incomprehensible at the same time. But that's not really a value I guess?

 

My art has to be absolutely clear and totally incomprehensible at the same time.

Can you explain that further?

 

What do I look for in art? Whether I like it. Whether it satisfies something in me.