[Strange Magic]

If evaluations of art are all equal, then all art is equal. Leonardo=Stick Man. That's corrosive.

Only corrosive if it becomes a pas/fail for entry into some sort of club. Besides, in my very own personal view, like you, I hold much art to be better than much other--the 95% is crap figure is quite accurate in the case of art especially in my own personal and unique view. Your reply indicates that you still fail to understand my position as to the primacy of the individual interface with art. I too prefer Rembrandt to the Stick Man (which is very like images seen on cave walls and cliff faces and hailed as Great Art . Now that I think about it, maybe set in that context, the Stick Man is closento being Rembrandt's equal. That of course is My Opinion--your opinion may differ.

 

[59540]

in my own personal and unique view.

But then your views may not be so unique. That's when a consensus forms: when a lot of individual views converge.

Now that I think about it, maybe set in that context, the Stick Man is closento being Rembrandt's equal.

I don't think so. The cave painting is pointing toward to what the Rembrandts would accomplish. A starting point. It's "equal to Rembrandt" only if you're ignorant of Rembrandt and/or choose to imaginatively exist in a cave-vacuum.

 

[Strange Magic]

Most of us discussing this are enlightened enough to not denigrate the tastes of others. And, contrary to what you infer by perseverating on the subject, no one (that I know of) is denying that individual tastes are totally subjective.

Speaking only of the CP era music, what you choose to ignore is that when a blueprint for what attracts a cross-section of people develops, an individual taste does not necessarily correlate with the quality of the music or the skill that was required to compose it, but collectively, over time, a consensus does. CP era music developed over centuries and, presumably, composers were challenged to innovate with more complex and sophisticated works to attract and enlarge new audiences. If that didn’t/doesn’t suggest the requirement of objective evidence of skill, then I don’t know what does.

Thus, came the Mozart symphonies, concertos and operas, the Beethoven sonatas, concertos and symphonies, the Chopin piano works, the Wagner operas and so forth. This process was an example of the very best of human creativity at work and to ignore the objective evidence of it is to diminish the accomplishment.

Sorry but No Sale. You, like Woodduck and I, have discussed these matters to a point well beyond the time spent by reasonable people on subjects where there is no real chance of agreement, let alone understanding.. As I stressed to Woodduck, we all agree we love art, CM, so many other and varied things so that it is time to shut it down, Yes? As the saying goes, insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. How about you?

 

[Strange Magic]

But then your views may not be so unique. That's when a consensus forms: when a lot of individual views converge.

I don't think so. The cave painting is pointing toward to what the Rembrandts would accomplish. A starting point.

Congratulations! Your first sentence might indicate that you are halfway there to understanding my position. Your second indicates that you have a view at variance with certain "Experts" who admire the freshness,simplicity, and earnestness of Cro-Magnon and aboriginal art. Surely they are wrong? Bach leads to Beethoven, and hence is the lesser composer, Yes?

 

[TwoFlutesOneTrumpet]

All art is created equal except some art is more equal than other art

Any premise that reaches the conclusion that Stick Man is equal to The Mona Lisa or that Beethoven's 5th is equal to a Justin Bieber hit must be discarded for the very fact that it allows for such ludicrous statements.

 

[Waehnen]

See my reply to Woodduck. Being defensive is not part of my nature as the mods will tell you. Nor is feeling threatened by tastes other than my own. And I repeat my mantra about art=opinion because I believe it to be a correct view: Here I Stand. You seem to be looking always for some middle ground halfway between Y and Z--Some say (let's postulate) that the earth is a cube; others that it is a sphere. Is your answer then that the earth is a cube with quite rounded corners and edges? I think not.

You totally skipped my comparison of a piece of art to a mountain. In your value system you give a piece of art some fundamentally other ontological status than you give a mountain.

Then again it is a fact both a mountain and a piece of art exist also in the natural world fundamentally in a similar way. Neither one of them is merely a subjective opinion in the mind of a perceiver. Living in this physical world you need to acknowledge the attributes a mountain and a piece of art possess in the perceivable dimensions and as information.

I have to admit your ontology is illogical and bad and it doesn’t carry credibility in any other way than being a ”handy abstractive tool for independent listeners”.

Only if you lived as some neural network on a distant space ship seperated physically from this world, could you to some practical extent talk about these abstract objects like mountains and pieces of art as though they were seperate from the natural world relevant to you. But still the fundamental ontology of neither object would be different.

Here on this planet it is just a very silly choice to ignore the ontology of a mountain and to claim it is just an opinion in the mind of a perceiver. I do not buy this position of yours.

Also I cannot hold ”changing the mind of Strange Magic” indicative of me and others opposing you being succesful in this discussion. It is obvious you will not ever admit to being inaccurate and not having found the only valid way of seing this. You have built your laser-focused position too long for that.

 

[DaveM]

Sorry but No Sale. You, like Woodduck and I, have discussed these matters to a point well beyond the time spent by reasonable people on subjects where there is no real chance of agreement, let alone understanding.. As I stressed to Woodduck, we all agree we love art, CM, so many other and varied things so that it is time to shut it down, Yes? As the saying goes, insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. How about you?

Well, the fact is I wasn’t trying to sell you on anything. I am well reminded of the saying about dragging a horse to water. I’m only reminding the general audience in as many different ways as possible what the truth is lest it be misled by the rhetoric from certain quarters.

 

[Strange Magic]

All art is created equal except some art is more equal than other art

Any premise that reaches the conclusion that Stick Man is equal to The Mona Lisa or that Beethoven's 5th is equal to a Justin Bieber hit must be discarded for the very fact that it allows for such ludicrous statements.

Please do discard it and never let it trouble you again. Understanding is denied you and it's better that we both move on.

 

[Woodduck]

I will attempt to clarify yet again by asking a question: If Bernini's sculpture of David or something very like it is sitting on the planet Thraa, several galaxies away, is it still art or simply just another oddly-shaped rock?

It is still art. It's the creation of a human mind, a mind that created it in a specific way with a specific purpose. Things don't lose their existence and identity because no one happens to be looking at them. If I remember correctly, we discover that in infancy.

"Art" objects so very obviously exist in the physical world that only a wet-lipped idiot would deny it, but they only obtain the status of Art by being perceived as such by human agency.

What you call "the status of Art" is merely a concept in your mind employing your own preferred definitions of words. It is not an objective description of reality. Objectively, a painting or a song is art because a person engaging in aesthetic thought and activity created it as art, and although that person hopes others will see or hear it, it doesn't cease to be art if that fails to happen. Nor does it suddenly become art again once seen or heard. The case is not equivalent to the tree falling in the forest, since sound (as opposed to sound waves) happens in the ear of the hearer. Art happens under the pen or brush of the creator.

And different perceivers will have different views as to its message, meaning, quality, integrity, some very far from the intention of the artist, if that has been stated by such.

Certainly. An artist understands and expects that his work may suggest meanings beyond his specific intentions. The meaning of a work of art is open-ended. That's part of what makes it wonderful. But you appear to infer from this that any view of the work is as valid as any other, including, presumably, the view of a two-year-old, of someone falling down drunk, of someone colorblind, or someone hallucinating on LSD, because validity in the understanding of art is a concept applicable only to the individual, with no factors existing objectively - in "external reality" - that limit what a work can legitimately be said to mean. After all, if a painting is art only when someone is looking at it, it must mean exactly what it is thought to mean while being looked at, no matter how outlandish a meaning it's assigned by the looker.

Whether this a correct deduction from your statements or not, I find it nonsensical.

 

[Strange Magic]

You totally skipped my comparison of a piece of art to a mountain. In your value system you give a piece of art some fundamentally other ontological status than you give a mountain.

Then again it is a fact both a mountain and a piece of art exist also in the natural world fundamentally in a similar way. Neither one of them is merely a subjective opinion in the mind of a perceiver. Living in this physical world you need to acknowledge the attributes a mountain and a piece of art possess in the perceivable dimensions and as information.

I have to admit your ontology is illogical and bad and it doesn’t carry credibility in any other way than being a ”handy abstractive tool for independent listeners”.

Only if you lived as some neural network on a distant space ship seperated physically from this world, could you to some practical extent talk about these abstract objects like mountains and pieces of art as though they were seperate from the natural world relevant to you. But still the fundamental ontology of neither object would be different.

Here on this planet it is just a very silly choice to ignore the ontology of a mountain and to claim it is just an opinion in the mind of a perceiver. I do not buy this position of yours.

Also I cannot hold ”changing the mind of Strange Magic” indicative of me and others opposing you being succesful in this discussion. It is obvious you will not ever admit to being inaccurate and not having found the only valid way of seing this. You have built your laser-focused position too long for that.

Your reply above indicates beyond doubt that you utterly and continuously fail to grasp my meaning. Of course a mountain and an art object can and do exist physically. But a mountain exists whatever is thought about it. An art object exists purely as an object without further definition other than what, like the mountain, can be measured, weighed, its color and height determined, etc. The mountain can become art if someone looks at it and declares it so. An art object is the same, though created by a human mind, it is an art object only if viewed as such by a perceiver. Otherwise it is dead, lump, a blob, a thing having no inherent property as "Art" If a mountain--not a painting of a mountain--is declared art, then who is its creator? Bishop Berkeley has one answer. If everything is or can be Art, then the arbitrariness, the subjectiveness of Art is fully on display.

I am content that we will never agree on these matters. I have bid goodbye to DaveM and Woodduck on this topic as we have spent many hundreds of posts on it when we could be listening to music of our choice, and you can mine those posts for ore for your thesis. I have engaged you as one relatively new to this discussion, but it is time to draw the curtain on the show and for everyone to go home, tired and maybe flushed with a sense of victory. I know I will.

 

[DaveM]

Oh shucks, just when the discussion was getting started... Oh well:

 

[Waehnen]

Your reply above indicates beyond doubt that you utterly and continuously fail to grasp my meaning. Of course a mountain and an art object can and do exist physically. But a mountain exists whatever is thought about it. An art object exists purely as an object without further definition other than what, like the mountain, can be measured, weighed, its color and height determined, etc. The mountain can become art if someone looks at it and declares it so. An art object is the same, though created by a human mind, it is an art object only if viewed as such by a perceiver. Otherwise it is dead, lump, a blob, a thing having no inherent property as "Art" If a mountain--not a painting of a mountain--is declared art, then who is its creator? Bishop Berkeley has one answer. If everything is or can be Art, then the arbitrariness, the subjectiveness of Art is fully on display.

I am content that we will never agree on these matters. I have bid goodbye to DaveM and Woodduck on this topic as we have spent many hundreds of posts on it when we could be listening to music of our choice, and you can mine those posts for ore for your thesis. I have engaged you as one relatively new to this discussion, but it is time to draw the curtain on the show and for everyone to go home, tired and maybe flushed with a sense of victory. I know I will.

A work of art also exists ”whatever is thought about it”, just like the mountain. It is you who CHOOSES to give an art object an ontological status — which in your value system allows you to treat the object with new laws of physics invented by yourself. After that you try to hold us accountable for your choices and speak language invented by you in an alternative universe you have also invented.

There are no art objects ontologically different from a mountain. The ontological art object status is your own invention.

 

[TwoFlutesOneTrumpet]

Please do discard it and never let it trouble you again. Understanding is denied you and it's better that we both move on.

It isn't understanding that is denied me - I quite understand your perspective and I see it being very wrong. And I agree that it's better to move on, you're not likely to come around.

 

[Forster]

@Strange Magic

Well, I got it. I'm not sure why it's so hard to see it - the difference between an 'art' object and 'art'. Not only did I get it, I find it an entirely helpful clarification.

Speaking only of the CP era music,

I noticed earlier your declaration that as far as you were concerned, you only wanted to refer to CP music. Why? AFAIK, while we might all bring the same two or three tiresome suspects to mind when we talk about CM, none of us is so determined to exclude other eras as you.

I suspect there is some subtle denigrating going on.

 

[Waehnen]

@Strange Magic

Well, I got it. I'm not sure why it's so hard to see it - the difference between an 'art' object and 'art'. Not only did I get it, I find it an entirely helpful clarification.

It is not a clarification but an arbitrary ontological extra status invented to free the listener from any exhausting bindings to the reality. It allows false omnipotency. It is the easy way.

 

[Forster]

It is not a clarification but an arbitrary ontological extra status invented to free the listener from any exhausting bindings to the reality. It allows false omnipotency. It is the easy way.

That's your interpretation and you're welcome to it. You only have to have attempted to follow the several threads that have discussed what is 'Beauty', or 'Music', or 'Art' to know that such matters are never resolved into a final consensus definition: it's up to us to settle on what serves us best. If this 'clarification' doesn't suit you, that's fine.

 

[Waehnen]

That's your interpretation and you're welcome to it. You only have to have attempted to follow the several threads that have discussed what is 'Beauty', or 'Music', or 'Art' to know that such matters are never resolved into a final consensus definition: it's up to us to settle on what serves us best. If this 'clarification' doesn't suit you, that's fine.

It really is an arbitrary and false ontological choice created to allow omnipotency for the listener. It is also an excuse to ignore the reality behind art. It is not a valid choice for anyone, only a handy abstract tool for listeners who want to bath in their own imagined independency.

 

[Forster]

It really is an arbitrary and false ontological choice created to allow omnipotency for the listener. It is also an excuse to ignore the reality behind art. It is not a valid choice for anyone, only a handy abstract tool for listeners who want to bath in their own imagined independency.

It took me ten seconds to find an exploration of 'art as a human concept' that questionns the investment in objects by an academic - so you don't have to take the word of a stranger on the internet. It doesn't "explain" what Strange Magic has been going on about, it just illustrates that there is a debate out there about what Art is, and it's not settled.

Art as Human Practice: An Aesthetics

How much does art really matter to human life? To paraphrase Auden on poetry, perhaps art doesn't make anything happen (at least in politics, in human m...

ndpr.nd.edu

 

[Sid James]

Regarding to the ongoing objective-subjective debate here, I managed to dig up what I said in an old thread about it. Here's an extract from the post in which I summed up my position on the topic:

Today, musicians have a whole lot of techniques and aesthetic approaches in their toolbox. There are also new theoretical approaches to and interpretations of music and its history, yet you wouldn’t really know much about it when reading those threads. Intersubjectivity, which Roger Waters mentioned, is one such relatively new approach.

I think that intersubjectivity and the new musicology, which aren't talked about much on this forum, offer a way out of arguments between the two extremes. People here might not know about these, or might be hostile to them as with other approaches coming out of postmodernism, possibly because they don't fit well into modernist notions which are still prevalent at TC (e.g. less restrictive definitions of the canon, interpretations of music history outside the grand narratives view, and music which resists being subjected to traditional methods of formal analysis).

 

[Waehnen]

It took me ten seconds to find an exploration of 'art as a human concept' that questionns the investment in objects by an academic - so you don't have to take the word of a stranger on the internet. It doesn't "explain" what Strange Magic has been going on about, it just illustrates that there is a debate out there about what Art is, and it's not settled.

Art as Human Practice: An Aesthetics

How much does art really matter to human life? To paraphrase Auden on poetry, perhaps art doesn't make anything happen (at least in politics, in human m...

ndpr.nd.edu

Multiple practical approaches and the absolute freedom of a listener I accept but not fundamental ontological claims motivated solely by convenience of an individual. Ontology is hard science.