"If I could do it, it ain't art." —Red Green
There's a discussion on Kevin's and Ben's blogs about whether there's any objective standard for art. I like to watch movies, and I've spent a lot of time thinking about what makes a movie good. Some movies that I feel like I should like but don't; others I like for exactly the reasons I hate another. And while there are some movies that almost nobody appreciates, there aren't really any movies that almost everyone appreciates. Can art itself really be "good" or "bad", or is it all in our heads?
To say that art is "good" or "bad" implies a purpose to the art that it either meets or falls short of. The high-level purpose for anything we would call art is to be appreciated by somebody. To know what people will appreciate, you have to understand people, so I don't think any criteria can be universal (i.e. we have no idea what kind of movies aliens would appreciate). But if any qualities are shared by all of humanity, they have potential to become a foundation for objective artistic principles, not objective in the sense that outside observers could agree about what is artistically valuable, but that they could agree about what humans would find artistically valuable.
You might be tempted to point to brain structures we have in common as examples of "shared qualities", but the human brain is designed to be extremely adaptable. Similarities in "artistic taste" are rare, and subtle differences in taste can have a big effect on how we evaluate a particular song or painting.
If you could agree on criteria, evaluating a specimen would become a much more objective process. The subjective part is deciding on the criteria. But some things intrinsically imply a particular purpose. A metal plate on a door in place of a handle suggests a purpose to be pushed, not pulled. If something suggests a purpose and then fulfills its suggested purpose, then it is "good" in a more "objective" way than something that doesn't suggest a purpose. By the same token, something that fulfills some purpose extremely well is more "objectively good" than something that doesn't really fulfill any purpose. The very fact that it works for some purpose suggests using it for that purpose (once that purpose is discovered). That said, we can find a purpose for almost anything, but some things have so much order to them that they're nearly perfect for one clear purpose and nearly useless for anything else (e.g. computer software).
Movies and television depend very heavily on understanding the purpose. That's why TV sitcoms use a laugh track to cue the viewer in to look for a joke. A bad movie can become a hilarious joke, and then from that vantage point become a great movie (okay, maybe not for everyone).
My conclusion is that when we say some art is good, we usually mean that there's some purpose it's good for. When people disagree, they usually disagree on the grounds that they don't value that purpose, and therefore that it's no purpose at all. The criteria are subjective on some levels and objective on others. Consequently, I don't think it's accurate to call art either purely subjective or purely objective.
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2 comments:
In art, 'good' and 'bad' do seem to be quite direct shorthand for "I like it," or "I dislike it" (or "I could see how someone could like/dislike it.") If my taste in movies is for dramas, and I see a comedy, I can still say that it is good (thinking that I can see how comedy lovers would like it).
But when two people disagree on whether a piece of art is good, the discussion tends to become one about the differing criteria each person uses in deciding. If I think Chet Baker is a great trumpetist and you tink Miles Davis is better, then we probably have different ideas of what constitutes a good trumpetist. (Rarely will it happen that two people agree on the same criteria yet disagree on whether the art lives up to it.)
In short, I have been in discussions with fellow art lovers (I went to a music college for undergrad after all!) to know that when two people differ in appraisals of art, there is no good "knock down" arguments that one can use especially if, as often happens, you and your interlocutor simply have different criteria for what constitutes good or bad.
But when two people disagree on whether a piece of art is good, the discussion tends to become one about the differing criteria each person uses in deciding.
Yes, and what makes that so frustrating is that nobody wants to call it a matter of different criteria (just the same way people want to call their moral claims "objective fact"). It always goes from that point to "my criteria are obviously better than yours".
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