Shaun Groves
It’s not an argument against our ability to know what we like, to know what we individually consider to be good. It’s an argument against the arrogant supposition that good is an absolute, that there is a universal standard that, if met, makes once thing “art” and another thing “crap, that what you call good is what the rest of us should call good, and that good music is called such based only upon what is heard and the skill needed to create it.
When we judge music, whether we’re a professional critic or a mother in a mini-van listening to the radio, we’re not judging it good or bad based only on what we hear. No, the label “good music” and, with it, the entire notion of “art”, is subjective and easily contaminated by what we see, smell, feel and think. Good isn’t just in the ear of the beholder.
Don’t believe me? Well, if you think you can spot great art, superior music, master musicianship because, hey, you know what good is – if that’s you, then you must read a recent news story in the Washington Post. It lays the smackdown on your self.
The Washington Post put Joshua Bell, a world renowned violinist (And a look-alike for Blossom’s older brother), in a DC Metro station to play for change as morning commuters passed by. Would anyone stop to listen to a man so obviously “good?” There’s even video. The best proof I’ve seen so far that “good” and “art” are concepts too subjective to even approach being absolutes.
Ben Bryan says:
A little problem: You have started with the definition of good as “what we like” and then said that since not everyone likes the same thing (or what “should” be considered good) then “good” can’t be absolute. This only says that if you define “good” as subjective then it isn’t absolute. Duh! But you’ve not actually addressed whether the definition could be different. What if good has nothing to do with whether we like it or not? Not everyone agrees on what is true, or even what does/would constitute truth. This disagreement, however, contrary to popular belief does not have any bearing on whether there actually is anything true. The same is true with “good.”
The problem is when we use “good” we have no clue what we mean by it. Everyday discussion tends to equate “good” to “what I like,” which is poor use of words, since good implies objectivity. So, if we are going to use good in a proper since, we’d better define it. And one can define it in whatever way you want as long as it is reasonable and others to whom you are speaking understand “good” to mean.
For example, I might talk about quality as value (in a larger sense) of the content, so for example Bob Dylan is better than Brittany Spears because Bob Dylan deals with deeper questions, he addresses himself to a better part of the human being.
2 things to note about objective good:
1-it doesn’t remove subjective value. I acknowledge that much classical music is better (in 2 senses: 1- more difficult to play 2-heightened and clearer emotional content) but I don’t really enjoy listening to it. I mean occasionally I listen to it and even appreciate its beauty, but it’s not something I really love to hear. And there’s nothing wrong with that.
2-there can be many useful definitions of “good.” We can make good whatever we want; all it is is a word to describe a quality in something, we just have to make clear when we use it, what we mean by it, which usually means using more than just the shorthand “good.” It’s just like talking about what is true. Any serious and meaningful discussion of truth quickly becomes not “is this particular thing true?” but “what is truth?”
3-Just because we can define good in different ways doesn’t mean our definition is changing whether something is good. Our definition of a particular word in describing something is only a choice to describe a particular sort of merit in the thing. Other sorts of merit may exist, which we are choosing not to examine at the moment.
Ben Bryan says:
haha, when I said “2 things to note” I meant 3. Poo on your lack of an “edit” button. And double poo on my need for an edit button.
Grovesfan says:
Ironic on the “experiment” with the violinist. I wonder though if it might have something to do with the environment in which he was “tested.” Playing for those who are in a hurry and on their way somewhere, undoubtedly running late, talking on the cell phone, etc. is not exactly condusive to really listening to something to determine if it’s good or not, but I get your point. When I listen to music, of course the beat, melody, harmony, etc. are very important, but I rate something as “good” based somewhat on how it makes me feel when I listen to it. What kind of emotions does it stir, if any. If there are lyrics, do they say something, do they fit the music? Sometimes I have to listen to things several times and in different “circumstances” if you will, before deciding whether or not I like it. I rarely, if ever buy music I’ve never heard before and when I have, it usually comes at the very strong recommendation of someone who’s musical opinion I appreciate. Doesn’t always mean I’ll like it though.
Beth
Dave Sims says:
Shaun, you’ve fallen too far to one side of this question. Yes, there is a powerful subjective element to all experience of art. But there’s also a powerful objective element as well, and unqualified statements that freeze the question to one side or the other are unhelpful. Sure, the passersby were unaware of the staggering musicianship that they were trudging by, but there’s no doubt every single one of them could tell the difference between Joshua Bell playing the violin and, say, myself. THAT’s objective.
Shaun Groves says:
Dave, why not call “staggering musicianship” simply, I don’t know, “staggering musicianship” instead of “art.”
I’m not communicating all that well so far, so let me come at this another way.
I asked a musician friend of mine once, who’s always going on about how what he does is art and what the other guy does is not, a simply question. He asserted that “art” is absolute, with standards ad definition created by God.
So I asked him the silly question: Does God have an absolute standard for cheeseburgers? If you go in a restaurant and have an incredible cheeseburger and you call it “good” are you applying some standard set by God?
He, to my astonishment, said yes. He said that “good” when it comes cheeseburgers and music and paintings HAS to be absolute. If any good isn’t set by God, isn’t a constant and and absolute we’re on a “slippery slope” toward relativism.
Cheeseburgers?? Seriously?
But you know, I bet there are chefs who think “good” food is defined by more than what the eater likes. They’d argue that their best dish is “good”, is “art” even, no matter how bad it tastes to you or me.
Why does this discussion matter at all? If it does, it’s because I went to music school and had professors tell me pop music isn’t art and can’t be. it doesn’t take enough skill to be. It doesn’t adhere to the rules of “art.” Therefore it isn’t good. It isn’t worth wasting talent and time and money on.
But here I am making not-art and seeing faces smile, lives change, and studio musicians struggle through charting the bridge to Welcome Home – a song that isn’t art but apparently requires more skill to figure out than some folks have.
“Art”, in my opinion, is one more stone we use to throw at each. People like me with educations in music use it to kill lesser musicians and put them in their place. We use it to feed our egos. And we do so because, some of us, think it’s a standard set by God Himself.
That’s bull. It’s nowhere in scripture. In fact, the concept of art as creative activity engaged in by the few, the most qualified, the professional, and not the many is a modern idea, propagated by hierarchical societies like our own.
Outside Western culture, and wherever we haven’t spread our philosophies, “art” doesn’t exist. Skill does. So why not use that word instead. It connotes practice, training, etc. It does not denote greater value to the soul, to God, greater significance or worth the way “art” does in our culture today.
Does that make anything clearer?
Dave Sims says:
Last night I was reading a goodnight story to my 2 year-old daughter. The story is called Olivia, and in it this little girl pig Olivia goes to the Metropolitan Museum to look at her favorite painting, I forget, but it was a real detail from some medieval work, ladies by a pool or something.
Then she goes down the hall and stares at a Jackson Pollack (again, an actual detail from the Metro—Pollack in a kids book, go figure). She exclaims she doesn’t understand it and that she could do that at home. So she goes home and splatters.
Now, I’m absolutely no modernist, never been a fan of Pollack or the like, but doggone it if Pollack’s splatters weren’t more interesting. I don’t know what to do with that. And I got that from my two year old’s bedtime story. Don’t know what to do with that either.
What does that have to do with Cheeseburgers? You’re point is well taken, and to me it provokes the classic “third man” argument that Aristotle deployed against Plato on this very question. If there’s a perfect EVERYTHING, an absolute, unquestionable standard for all objects, then you’ve gone some weird consequences. There must be a perfect CHEESEBURGER in God’s mind, against which all cheeseburgers must be measured. Maybe eating an In And Out burger is an even more religious experience than I thought it was, but I doubt it.
But I don’t think Aristotle (or you) get off quite so easily. There is definitely a continuum, stretching from, say, White Castle to, for instance, In And Out, along which are unquestionably “good” burgers and “bad” burgers. So there’s the objective element again, and we need that as well.
So Pollack makes more interesting spatters than Oliva the pig, and In And Out is objectively, unquestionably, and incontrovertably a better cheeseburger than White Castle. But there is no real or imagined Perfect Splatter (would it have been “worse” if three dots of paint had gone three centimeters to the right?) and there is no real or imagined Perfect Burger. You can have pickles with that, or not, mustard, or mayo, and you will not diminish the Cheesburger-y Goodness of your In And Out. Just keep the White Castles on your side of the car please.
Shaun Groves says:
In And Out is objectively, unquestionably, and incontrovertably a better cheeseburger than White Castle
This is starting to feel silly, but I’ll go with it…
No, this is not unquestionable, incontrovertible etc etc. It’s not objective.
It doesn’t come from outside us. The standard, I mean. For burgers. Again, feeling silly here but…
Are there people who in their heart of hearts (tongue of tongues) believe White Castle is superior to In and Out? Probably. There are people who think Chick-fil-A sucks. I know. I know. These people should be killed for such heresy. But they do exist.
Brody prefers this really bad Mexican food place he took me to in his hometown in California over Pappasito’s in Houston, Texas. I need to post those pictures on SHLOG soon. You won’t believe how obviously superior Pappasito’s even LOOKS, let alone tastes. I’m not exaggerating here. There was no comparison.
But he swears his place beats Pappasito’s.
There is no objectivity in the “goodness” of food or “art.” None.
There may be a general consensus but there’s no objectively, incontrovertibly etc etc. Doesn’t exist.
So, why laud superiority over one another based on such subjective labels? Why call one work art and the other crap?
Call one skilled. Harder to reproduce. Beautiful. Pay more for it. But don’t call it “art” and then define art as something nearer to the heart of God, or better for humanity, blah blah blah.
(btw, I have a few Olivia books. I’ll have to see if we have that one.)
When I took my daughter to the art museum I was awed that I was standing in front of a real Van Gogh. You know what she was in awe of? A print by a local high school student. She said is was her favorite. Subjective.
Dave Sims says:
“There may be a general consensus but there’s no objectively, incontrovertibly etc etc. Doesn’t exist.”
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.
Shaun Groves says:
I agree with you, Dave. On all this, actually.
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
Dave Sims says:
Yeah, I think we agree for the most part. I do think there’s a difference between “skill” and “art” (Aristotle would call it “techne” and “poesis”—I bet you didn’t know you were invoking Aristotle, or maybe you did and you’re much less prone to name-dropping than I am) but that’s another conversation.
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
Shaun Groves says:
Who are you, Dave? Wine connoisseur? Aristotle enthusiast? Amazing you’re here talking with me. Thanks for that.
Dave Sims says:
I’m a very distractable dilettante and occasional musician and music writer. My day job is computer programmer and I have half a degree in philosophy. It is *I* who am privileged to speak to *you* sir…
Stephen @ Rebelling Against Indifference says:
Here’s an example a friend sent me when we were talking about context and subjectiveness:
“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.”
W. E. Messamore says:
I heard the violinist story, but its flaw is that it equates “good” musicianship with “that which will gain a lot of tips from passersby.” We marvel at the story because we know that the music is objectively good. That is why we find it ironic that the violinist didn’t make very much in tips. This is why I believe the story actually proves objective good, rather than disproving it. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be so shocked as we read it.
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.
Stephen @ Rebelling Against Indifference says:
Wow, W. E. Messamore, I’m impressed. You’re familiar with every other aesthetician in the modern world? I’m assuming that’s how you are able to call Ayn Rand “the most brilliant”.
Dave Sims says:
My two favorite modern essays on aesthetics are Maritain’s Art and Scholasticism (particularly Chapter 8, which should be required reading for any Christian going into the arts) and T.S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent.”
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
Dave Sims says:
(sigh)
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.