/philosophy/ - Philosophy

You have to have a measured aim to judge how well something accomplishes the aim.

"Art" is so vague that your question is meaningless. You have to specify what kind of art, and what aim it has.

For starters...

This is an hour-long that I think is going to start becoming a classic in contemporary discourse on art (ignore the view count, the original was deleted).

It's by the English conservative Roger Scruton, who contends that all Western art prior to the 20th century was consistent in having a fixation towards the achievement of "beauty", which is simply to create a product which delivers something aesthetically that can't be described by a rational breakdown of what is going on within the work. Schools of art are then, like schools of philosophy, traditions that promote and elaborate on aesthetic arguments seen to be profound.

Modern art is the rejecting the notion that one should be committed to demonstrating beauty in good faith, and that freedom to create is all that should be prized. Scruton contends that we can thus declare that modern art actually fails at being art, and has even become anti-art by the 21st century since it almost tries to declare that there is nothing more to its works than what can be rationally broken down.

Conceptual art is in fact a movement that contends that the way an art piece is put together and how it finally looks should not infringe on the artist's concept. That is to say, if I want to express the confusion generated in our culture by mass commercial media, then slitting open a rooster and cramming a keyboard and naked Barbie dolls into its corpse is a totally valid way to do so. If some pretentious yuppie can come up with an explanation for the work, than that is proof of how deep he is, that he could come up with the most arbitrary links between the stuffed rooster and my message. If you can't, you're probably not that intuitive, or you're just prejudiced by a fascist sense of essentialism.

>>2800

So what we have thus far is:

a) Meditation can be "objectively" measured to be good for you

b) Due to this, we can say if someone is meditating incorrectly as an after-the-fact proxy observation, not a critique of the methods themselves.

c) Developing and understanding methods of meditation are entirely "subjective" (they are accountable only to your mind).

This bridging of the conventional objective vs. subjective dichotomy indicates that empiricism is not the only way to know of something that is independent of you, and if it has been correctly understood. It is only a guaranteed way for multiple people to quickly agree on the same thing.

We cannot discard the very real possibility, one that I think we will find instances of in life encounters, that there are true things can be encountered and correctly understood in a personal way that does not lend themselves to easy multi-perspective verification. This is not mysticism; it's a critique of the methodological constraints of science, logic and empiricism.

To answer your original question OP, if there are greater truths, independently existing beauties, and so on, it's indeed possible that some artworks convey them better than others, and that some artists are thus better than others.

Unfortunately, verification is limited to the powers of each person's own personal effective grasp of these essences, and can only be shared with those of like effectiveness. Belligerent charlatanism and innocent ignorance are unavoidable dangers that can be overcome only by correct insight and confidence in the correctness of your own insight.

>>2801

>Unfortunately, verification is limited to the powers of each person's own personal effective grasp of these essences,

So, the worst and weakest thesis on the concept of art is what you espouse, i.e. visual and musical art really is whatever speaks to your own private sensibilities and nothing else, the beautiful is meaningless in this sense other than the act of relating a piece to one's emotions. If this is all art is, conceptual art IS art as much as pretty 2d pictures on mongolian web forums are.

Hegelian theory of art and Marxist theories of art are more interesting than this.

>>2810

>>2810

You have a big gap in your argument called BEAUTY, which you have no capacity to define besides feeling intuition, i.e. subjective feelings.

You do realize you can't do this if you actually want to have an aesthetic theory, right? You can't just say that art's 'objective' aim is beauty, yet have beauty be a completely indeterminate and subjective thing. You also cannot divorce beauty from feeling, so you need to find a way to either reconceptualize art (you must still specify what art) to not really be about beauty, or conceptualize beauty in a way that the subjective feeling corresponds/correlates/is an objective active relation.

>>2735

This might be a noob answer but I'm just bumping the board really.

Art can be technically impressive and realistic, which is criteria for it being objectively good, but the feelings it conjures in people are subjectively good. Both, I think, are important to produce actually enjoyable (good) art. One thing for certain is that the modern idea that it's okay to make technically (objectively) shit art that can conjure up no feelings unless you 'explain' the piece with a little note or if you tell people when they're looking at it in the gallery or w/e, is shit. That's just not art. It's finger painting with elephant shit and you saying to people it signifies the west raping Africa and then liberals immediately crying to signal how not racist they are and calling you a great artist and giving you money for your elephant shit finger painting.

>>2844

>complex technique

>realism

>objective criteria for 'good' art

Haha, what bore you are. It's been proven that the number one style of art people prefer is NOT realism, it's impressionism.

Second, just because someone makes a piece that does not appeal to you does not make it objectively bad or not art. Art is not universal, it can only be aimed at a set of groups to understand and appreciate. The only thing which can fail to be art is art which cannot connect to its intended audience. It wouldn't matter if some other audience appreciated it and thought it was great art, it would be a supreme objective failure on the mere ground that it could not convey what it intended.

>>2853

how is that a success?

>centuries old artwork destroyed

>"success" because it was an internet meem for a few years

>>2800

What do Sam Harris and meditation have to do with subjective–objective distinctions, or why would this support some form of "subjectivism" (as opposed to some Anglo "objectivism"?)?

Why not double dip into empiricism and track gurus' brainwaves, instead?

The way I see it, your post is about the lack of a reliable measure (of whether I am meditating or not), rather than the lack of a possible measure. Reliability can be improved, and science owes much of it's advance to it (mechanics to clocks, astronomy to telescopes, biology to microscopes). I don't see why anything ought to be called "subjective" or "objective", without qualification, even more so when dealing with the conventional definition of these words, which isn't clear cut.

>>2735

Craftsmanship, talent, and accessibility.

>>2814

That line of reasoning can be applied to literally anything.

>>3081

You should read Kant.

>>2799

I'll check the video later. For now, all I see is "if we define art as X, then everything non-X is not art". Well, that's convenient provided X actually works for a definition of art. That it tries to achieve "beauty" is, to my mind, not at all sufficient. What is beauty? Countless of examples that predate 'modern' art had a very different goal [depiction of 'reality', or concepts like authority, religious faith/'truth'/experience - or the affective realm in general - opulence, individuality, perspective, etc], which you can, of course, twist into being ultimately a version of or an attempt at capturing "beauty", but by that point you've ceased to actually explain anything. You will also be able to twist the outgrowths of 'modern' and experimental art to fit the definition.

Where you are right is that the premise or the intention of art seems to have a major difference in its creation and reception [duh], and that the approach of modern art in its outright refusal to accept boundaries of any kind makes for a very particular group of 'art' that can quite easily be distinguished from forms that have actual boundaries established for themselves, no matter what they be. However, from this no qualitative conclusion about being better or worse can be drawn beyond these approach-relative attempts [whereas internally it makes perfect sense to judge one portrait as being 'better' in expressing the likeness of a person than another].

>>2810

>My first of three posts was even about how we can concretely and objectively classify art as the pursuit of beauty

I must have missed where you say HOW we can classify art as pursuit of beauty, you only say THAT it can be understood as such. Is this where watching Scruton becomes necessary? If so I would apprechiate you elaborating the thoughts in your own words as well.