I just read that first paragraph again, after a long time. A balm for the CCM-weary soul. The whole essay is pretty much there in the first 10 sentences or so. Amazing, inspiring. I swoon.

Again, required reading. Go there now. Stop what you’re doing.

Seriously.

Shaun, I’d espescially love to get your reaction to the Maritain. It’s a very short essay, very readable. Belmont should make it part of their course requirements.

http://maritain.nd.edu/jmc/etext/art8.htm

Certainly the word “art” means something.  It indicates something.  So after determining what art is and does, it is a simple matter of seeing what kinds of art best exemplify this definition and carry out art’s function qua art.  These are what we call “good” art.  We may disagree over what art is good, but as Ben Bryan points out in the first comment on this thread, this does not mean that there is no objective good to begin with. 

In fact, it shows that both disagreeing sides acknowledge that there is an objective standard of good, and that their view of it is more accurate than the other’s or that their appraisal of the art in question is more accurate.  Otherwise quarreling over what art is better makes about as much sense as trying to convince someone to like chocolate more instead of vanilla.

I don’t have space to go into it here, but I define art and set as the objective criteria for evaluating art here:  http://slaying-dragons.blogspot.com/2006/08/art-it-definitely-has-definition-i-was.html

Or even better, purchase and read Ayn Rand’s Romantic Manifesto, as she is the most brilliant aesthetician of the modern world.

“Cornell university has a first rate food testing lab complete with a fine dining restaurant to see how people eat. in one experiment they separated the room (about 15 tables, i think) into two groups. they took a bottle of charles shaw wine (2 buck chuck) and steamed the labels off. on one half of the bottles they put NAPA somewhere on the bottle, on the other half they put NORTH DAKOTA on it. both wines were labelled “cabernet sauvignon” and everyone who was eating that night received a free glass of wine with their meal (which cost $20).

The purpose was to see how long people would “linger” after dinner. not so surprisingly, those that had what they thought was a NAPA cab, stayed, on average, 10 minutes longer than the NORTH DAKOTA drinking group. not only that, but the NAPA group cleaned their plates while the ND group left food…and the ND group reported the experience to be “average” even though they were given the exact same wine and food…and paid the exact same price.”

And re: the “experience” of spending more, etc.: it turns out California has caught up in that regard as well:

http://www.colgincellars.com/news/newsitem.php?id=35&showcat=1

Good conversation, Shaun.

best,

Dave

Let’s have a burger together to celebrate.

My problem is accepting the wine example, however, comes from reading so many marketing books.  We humans confuse confuse the experience of finding the product, buying the product and how the product makes others feel and think about us with the actual product itself.

Thus, the example of my daughter skipping Van Gogh for the high schoolers print.  the product itself pleased her.  She didn’t know it’s more acceptable to like Van Gogh.  She didn’t know everyone says Van Gogh is great and no one’s heard of this Rodriguez kid…yet.  She was evaluating the product…and maybe the frame it was in and that it was hung at her eye level and not mine.

Is California wine better than French wine?  Better tasting with a blindfold on, but blindfolds limit the experience to taste only.  French wine may well be “better” when measuring the whole experience of the French product – the way you feel when spending more money on something, the way those you dine with feel about you (or how you think they feel about you) when you drink French and not domestic.  The whole experience of French wine may well feel “better.” That’s marketing.  Not art.  Not objective good or bad.

But, again, I agree with your basic point.  Art and good are subjective.  There’s consensus that In and Out’s burgers are better than White Castle’s but there’s no absolute standard from on high for burgers that either comes closer to than the other.  And, no, no one should be mean when pointing out what they like and don’t like.  But they are. Not just professionals.  Mostly amateurs.  Musicians.  Painters.  Pop stars.  Mean for no “good” reason.

Thanks for commenting, Dave.  I learned a thing or too.  Thanks for that.

-Shaun

Ok, I was exaggerating slightly for effect, and a silly one at that. When I say “objective” I’m not saying I have some blueprint or absolute criteria. All anyone really has is a well of experience of similar things, and a community sounding board to measure one’s subjective experience against. But within that subjectivity, usually some kind of trend towards a standard emerges. Why burgers in the first place? Why put ground beef between two buns? Why add cheese? Because at some point we experimented and found we liked buns better than crackers and cheese better than peanut butter. Some things work and some things don’t.

Sure the continuum is fluid, and there’s a huge space for subjectivity and taste and opinion at every juncture. I’m not denying that, or saying that my preference for In and Out over White Castle is absolute and everyone else can go pound sand. But just about anyone who’s had both will side with me on this. You can present a few counterexamples, (maybe) but most people would look askance, and see the White Castle advocate’s “taste” as being a bit off.

Case in point: in 1976 not a single wine critic in France or the world would have said California wines could touch a well-made French Bordeaux, much less one of the great Chateaus. But in a blind tasting with some prominent French wine writers, a California wine won by a significant margin. All of a sudden California wine was on the map. They repeated the experiment 10 years later, different wine critics, same results.

Now, on your side of the argument, wine critics rarely agree completely, and there is a HUGE subjective component to wine tasting. But when a truly great wine comes along, really experienced wine tasters tend to agree that it is great. How do they know this? Not from a blueprint or Platonic knowledge of Perfect Wine, but the subjective aesthetic completeness of the wine on its own terms. Some things just SUCCEED, and that’s how we come to know what possibilities are present in a given discipline. Bob Dylan’s Bringing it All Back Home opened up some things in rock songwriting that had not been even attempted before. Highway 61 Revisited cashed out that promise with spectacular effect and changed the way songwriters approached their craft. The greatness of those records are objective, if for no other reason than the fact that everything after that was in some sense IN REFERENCE to those records. They succeeded on their own terms so completely that they changed the landscape.

“So, why laud superiority over one another based on such subjective labels?  Why call one work art and the other crap?”

That’s a pretty strong dichotomy. Aren’t there, like, a trillion degrees of variance in between those poles? You seem to be saying that the existence of any measure of objective value in art means that we have to call everything else “crap.” Being an “objectivist” doesn’t mean you have to be mean about it.

And in any case, the most interesting critics don’t just say “crap” or “art” and leave it at that. If they’re doing their job well, they dive into the work and unpack it in all its particularity. They not only try to assess the worth of something, they try to understand it on its own terms, write about it in such a way that opens it up to others, puts it in a context, makes it relevant. And in doing that the really competent critics discover to what degree a work was successful on its own terms, as well as in terms of what has gone before. I don’t know of any working critic who works from a strict program, a rigid aesthetic grid that all art must be sifted through. The first job is just to encounter a work as it is. And usually the more time you spend with a work, the more it begins to reveal its own goals and how much it actually accomplished those goals. And when you find a work that has really accomplished its goals beautifully, you can add it to your (for lack of a better word) canon of works that show what is possible. Like Dylan. Not everybody likes Dylan, but everybody lives with the pop music landscape that he made possible, songs and entire styles that wouldn’t have existed had he not succeeded in his vision so completely.

Sorry, I’m getting long-winded. Bottom line for me: there’s a subjective and objective element to every experience in art, and I’m always leery of sacrificing one for the sake of the other. The paradox that lies between the two is one of the things that makes art so mysterious and infinitely fascinating.