Look what I found!

dailymeh:

I have this feeling that some works of art are good, because I like them, and some aren’t, because I don’t. But some of the works I don’t like are simply works that fall outside of my taste, works which might bore me or annoy me, but that I can see others enjoying; the rest of the works I dislike are works that not only fall outside my taste, but are actively bad, and the people who like them must have horrible taste. This strikes me as a common attitude, though I’m most comfortable interrogating my own prejudices and so wouldn’t swear it’s universal: we put works of art — broadly defined, including journalism, novels, poems, songs, performances, movies, sculptures, paintings, photographs, and much else besides — into one of three categories: those we like, those we don’t like, and those that are horrible and which if someone likes them are grounds for ridicule. (Maybe the “those we don’t like” category could also be divided into Canon works, works we don’t get but feel are important because they are widely considered to be important and about which we’re willing to entertain the notion that we’ve simply misunderstood them; and those works we don’t get but imagine someone sane, but totally unlike us in major ways could enjoy.)

But I wonder: what grounds do we have for making this distinction between “bad art” and “simply a matter of taste”? Between stuff that, we recognize, it’s simply a matter of different tastes if we like or dislike, and stuff that, we seem to think, are simply bad and indicators of bad taste? Related is the distinction between art we enjoy and art that’s “good”, because while we’re inclined to say that art we like is good, we can also have “guilty pleasures”, which are works we enjoy but that we can’t rationally defend the qualities of to others, and there can be work we recognize as “good”, for the opposite reason — we (or someone else) can rationally defend their qualities to others — but that we don’t like. In general, the question is whether we have grounds to uphold a distinction between what we like or dislike, and what is good and bad in art.

I don’t believe there’s an objective standard of art. There’s no metaphysical yardstick we can compare a novel, a picture, a dance, a tv series, a song or a poem to and read off its artistic qualities. Taste is, in the end, subjective, which doesn’t mean that there aren’t culturally and biologically anchored commonalities between our individual tastes. The important thing to note about the distinction between “liked” and “good” and between “not liked” and “bad” is that one is based on experience, while the other is based on theory. But is the theory worth anything if it can’t connect to the metaphysical yardstick, because there isn’t one?

That depends on what you consider the ultimate purpose and nature of art to be. Is it experiential or theoretical? I believe that art isn’t theoretical. I don’t think the theory of art is meaningless, but it must always be secondary to experience. Art is an experience: good art is a good experience (not necessarily a pleasurable one; it might instead be enlightening, and sometimes the truth hurts); bad art is a bad experience (not necessarily a painful one; it could also be the opposite of enlightening, closing off our eyes to the painful truth). But if art is experience and experience alone, how can anything but experience be a measure of art’s value?

There are some options: one, theory could be a generalization of experience. Perhaps the theoretical aspects of art, our grounds for praising Canon works we don’t like, comes from extracting from experience the commonalities between the works we do like, and between the works we don’t like. Suppose you’re standing before the Mona Lisa and you’re disappointed: it looks nice enough, but fails to grip you like supposedly “lesser” paintings do. Or you hear Mozart and retreat to modern pop out of boredom. You could still recognize that the painting or the symphony has most of the qualities common in works you like, and few of the qualities common in works you don’t like; perhaps in this way, we can conclude that something is “good” — because it has the ingredients of good and none of the ingredients of bad, as generalized from experience — even if in this particular work, we don’t get that click, that connection we like to associate with good works, or “bad” because it has the ingredients of bad and none of the ingredients of good, even if this work does click. But this still feels unsatisfactory. It feels like if theory is based in experience, then disagreement between experience and theory should be grounds for revising the theory, not for concluding that there is one “good” in practice and one “theoretical good” which is equally valid.

Another option to ground a theoretical measurement of value alongside the practical is to observe that my experience is individual. But art may not be individual, it could just as easily be social. Maybe the “theoretical” value of a work of art is based on its value to some group; but then how do you decide which works are “theoretically good” and which are “theoretically bad” when many works have both devoted followers and equally devoted detractors? Does it simply become a numbers game? Is every work of art that has a large, loyal fanbase good simply because it provides value to the group? And how does this play into the distinction in the beginning of this post, between not liked and bad? Because many of the works I feel are not simply outside my taste but actively bad have devoted fandoms. Also, in the end, my subjective experience is still the base, fundamental way I interact with art. Since I cannot directly experience others’ experience of art, it seems like their experienc of it can never be anything but a second-grade evaluation, one that must bow to the only tangible test I have of the quality of any work of art: my personal experience with it. As long as taste is subjective, it seems like anything but subjective experience is going to be irrelevant unless I choose to make it relevant. And why would I choose to make other people’s opinions relevant? When dealing with art, I’m not interested in being empathic for the sake of it; I don’t want to judge bad art as good out of sympathy for its fans, nor do I want to judge good art as bad out of sympathy with its detractors.

A third possibility is to note that good art need not be pleasurable, and bad art need not be painful (however broadly you define pain and pleasure). Perhaps art’s “theoretical value” can be tied to its power to enlighten us? But the question of truth in art is thorny in its own right. I have a feeling that art need not be true to be good; I feel like propaganda for falsehoods and horrible values could still be good when judged purely as art, and likewise, propaganda for the truth and for morally upstanding values need not be good when judged as art.

A fourth is to define art’s theoretical value by convention: “good” (as opposed to liked) art is art that conforms to society’s generally accepted aesthetic norms at the time (and so relative to both time and space). Or, to avoid senseless populism, perhaps art’s theoretical value is art that conforms to the accepted aesthetic norms of those generally accepted as the artistic elite by society at a time. (Phew! In practice, this would mean curators, art critics, respected artists and perhaps major art dealers.) But there is something iffy about all this relativizing that neither brings us closer to any objective ideal nor truly embraces subjectivity. Instead of searching for a non-subjective standard, instead of relying on my own subjective experience and so embracing subjectivity, I should delegate the responsibility of weighing art’s worth to some arbitrary elite? Why? I feel like either art is either truly about one’s own personal experience, or it’s about the (imaginary) metaphysical yardstick, but, like in the attempt to define theoretical value in terms of social groups above, the attempted middle-road feels neither here nor there, like it allows me neither to have nor eat my cake, but instead gives the cake to an unrelated third party.

Despite all these misgivings, I’m not convinced that the only meaningful measure of the value of a work of art is my own personal experience of it. That sounds hopelessly self-centered. At the same time, I don’t know how to rationally defend or define the difference between “stuff I like” and “good stuff I’d like if you had good taste”, “stuff I don’t like” and “bad stuff I’d have to have horrible taste to like”.

Reblogged from Daily Meh.

November 23, 2009, 10:24pm