Graffiti & Girls

Use this forum to have philosophical discussions about aesthetics and art. What is art? What is beauty? What makes art good? You can also use this forum to discuss philosophy in the arts, namely to discuss the philosophical points in any particular movie, TV show, book or story.
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Hereandnow
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Joined: July 11th, 2012, 9:16 pm
Favorite Philosopher: the moon and the stars

Re: Graffiti & Girls

Post by Hereandnow »

When we talk we agree to basic body of assumptions regarding what is what: I say 'chair', you hear it and are familiar with the convention of using those verbal noises to associate with certain sensory intuitions, their form, contexts of menaing,etc. and we have agreement. Most of this, of course, is vast and tacitly acknowledged only. The accepted wisdom on this agreement is that it is only possible if we actually have the same kind of experiences. The complexity of the language and its success in making for agreement suggests there is a great deal that is held is common. So, since the the art world, whatever field the same is true: there isa lot of aesthetic communication on among afficionados, professionals, suggesting that judment has, if not strictly speaking, objective(of course, this spills over into everything since objectivity in communication is actually only intersubjective agreement, is true objectivity even possible? That is why I am such a fan of Husserl, Kierkegaard, et al; these guys put truth at the center of subjectivity, where verifiability is direct and intuited, There are arguments against this, obviously) very solidly intersubjectively in tact. If aesthetic evaluative language is like this, it must be the case that there are shared aesthetic experiences that can be evaluated in like ways.
Pastabake
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Joined: October 18th, 2012, 5:30 am

Re: Graffiti & Girls

Post by Pastabake »

I'm not disputing whether or not we can agree on what a chair is ... I agree that we can dissect art into things such as tone, timbre, melody, brush stroke, colour etc ... the problem is that art is not the sum of its parts.

I don't see where the inter-subjective agreement comes in when as I pointed out earlier many great novelists have fallen out of favour ... dropped from being great art to landfill.

I feel that pronouncements on what constitutes 'good' art are a fiction, at best the story of a democracy with a very narrow franchise, constantly being rewritten by its fleeting constituents. At worst the dictatorship of oligarchs.
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Hereandnow
Posts: 2837
Joined: July 11th, 2012, 9:16 pm
Favorite Philosopher: the moon and the stars

Re: Graffiti & Girls

Post by Hereandnow »

I'm not disputing whether or not we can agree on what a chair is ... I agree that we can dissect art into things such as tone, timbre, melody, brush stroke, colour etc ... the problem is that art is not the sum of its parts.

I don't see where the inter-subjective agreement comes in when as I pointed out earlier many great novelists have fallen out of favour ... dropped from being great art to landfill.

I feel that pronouncements on what constitutes 'good' art are a fiction, at best the story of a democracy with a very narrow franchise, constantly being rewritten by its fleeting constituents. At worst the dictatorship of oligarchs
.


But the agreement we have about the world is the basis for a belief that we have similar experiences. Technically, even ordinary objects cannot be reduced to language any more than aesthetic emotions. You never witness the phenomenon of a chair in my head; rather you depend on the system of sounds and signs that we have an evolved agreement on to point to, if you will, things "out there". It is the details and the consistency that make it work, but never an actual sharing of what has been called qualia, the subjective raw feels. These remain entirely beyond the reach of others. So, just as the consistency and specificity of talk of chairs (clouds, mountains, pens, and all empirical items) gives rise to an inference that there is considerable similarity in the way we experience things, the same consistency in our aesthetic judgments provides for a similar inference here.

As to aesthetic judgments changing in time (things dropping from being art) you argue that such change indicates a failure of the world to provide a consistent basis for the same kind of objectivity you find in things standardly considered to be objective, like chairs and the rest. But rather than a lack of agreement, it is simply the failure for things to endure in their acknowledged value. We get tired of a genre, or, the genre wears itself out, becomes repetitive;it would appear that our tastes, people's in general, that is, are not as relentless as Picasso's, which never tired of painting the same bottle over and over. One could argue that since this occurs to society as a whole, as one movement, the loss of interest in a particular art form is actually indicative of a shared art experience.


If judgment in art were a fiction, then statements like "that interpretation/performance really did not work at all" would be meaningless and resting on the error tht one can be better than another. But, of course, there are perfectly horrible wroks of art out there and jdgment against them can be well explained and validated. Now, there is not perfect agreement on this, but then, your example of the color blind goes to removing objectivity from even simple perceptual objects. Do you want to claim there is no objectivity (intersubjectivity) here?
Pastabake
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Joined: October 18th, 2012, 5:30 am

Re: Graffiti & Girls

Post by Pastabake »

I think there's a fundamental difference between objects and ideas so I'm not so sure it's helpful to appeal to any agreement that we may have about such things and then extrapolate from one to the other.
Hereandnow wrote:the loss of interest in a particular art form is actually indicative of a shared art experience.
I think that this is where we differ most, I feel that such transient connections are better explained by factors extrinsic to the artwork itself. What does it mean to call something great art if a few weeks later it could be considered otherwise?

In using the word fiction I wasn't trying to say it was false but rather a story of the time. I'm not so sure that there are perfectly horrible works of art, sure there are plenty that I don't personally like but who am I to suggest that someone else's opinion is wrong?

Colour is a secondary attribute of perceptual objects ... I think we can all agree on the primary attributes of shape etc.

Any way it's clear that I should do a bit more reading on the subject so do you have some book suggestions?
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Hereandnow
Posts: 2837
Joined: July 11th, 2012, 9:16 pm
Favorite Philosopher: the moon and the stars

Re: Graffiti & Girls

Post by Hereandnow »

Funny how this issue pulls one this way and that. My greatest interest in aesthetics is not about agreement of standards of judgment. I already know that value, once taken up into the complexity of human affairs is very messy and inconsistent. But I want to know what value is. It's a metaethics/metaaethetics question. I remember reading Wittgenstein's Lecture on Ethics and his Culture and Value; these and others made me aware of the question of value: What is it? Why do things matter. Even Wittgenstein had a great respect for the suggestion of the mystical because it is at the front of our priorities but it is never seen, never witnessed in the observable world. Anyway, that is why I think ethics is the most important issue in philosophy. We can talk about meanings, but what meaning has meaning itself?

"Art" by Clive Bell; "Art as Experience" by Dewey; "The Art World" by Danto; "Defining Art" by Dickie.

These are the works remember most. I have in my soft library many, many works-books, articles, guides. It's enormous. If you could figure out how to have access of these withot using this web site (some are not strictly legally gotten, I think). I would be happy to give you as much as you like. More than ten gigs of philosophy.
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