I have no idea what this means. Where did anyone get a wrong year?
Huh? If you take apart a Rolls-Royce piece by piece, part by part…it’s not a Rolls-Royce anymore. If you zoom in on one square inch of dirt, you’re very likely to miss the view of the entire Grand Canyon.
Look - take a cave man from 10,000 B.C., thaw him out and put him in front of, say, The Last Supper. Or The Persistence of Memory. There’s zero context for him to relate to what he’s looking at. I guess a rough equivalent might be cave drawings for us modern people: We find them fascinating because they are tangible fingers pointing back to the dawn of human history, but nobody would consider the cave drawings themselves as ‘masterpieces’, right? We can consider them art, but it’s thanks to the context we’re able to view them in. Case in point: If my 4yr old drew the same thing on our kitchen wall, he’d be experiencing an all-together different context.
shrug I’m not explaining it anywhere near as well as Half Man Half Wit has. But it boils down to, you’re not capable of understanding the differences between junk and art. And I fully understand the temptation to brand anything you ‘don’t get’ as ‘junk’. Not my problem. Your loss.
Of course, the book has been very widely criticized. But it’s also beside the point: certainly, as with any industry, money is a driving factor. It just doesn’t follow that therefore, there’s no other value to art. It’s the same fallacy the OP engages in, dressed up in slightly different clothes. It’s also present in this text:
Basically, the argument is that cite proliferation can be modelled by a stochastic process, and that thus, scholars only cite what has already been cited, because it has been cited. And of course, that’s true, to a point: them that’s got shall get, and a paper that is referred to often will be referred to more often. But again, the larger conclusion is unjustified, and can be seen to be wrong, both logically and empirically.
First, just because something can be modelled statistically, does not mean that it actually follows a random process. Take Brownian motion: it can be perfectly well modelled by a random walk; however, it is not actually the case that a grain of pollen in liquid makes a random decision regarding what direction to turn. Rather, the randomness is a measure of our ignorance of the actual microscopic dynamics. If we knew the motion of all the molecules, we could predict the motion of the pollen in a perfectly deterministic way, getting rid of all randomness (in the limit where quantum effects remain negligible, at least).
Second, if cite propagation were an entirely random process, then the number of times a paper is cited would not be an indicator for the quality of that paper. But this isn’t the case: in my field, the top cited papers are almost unequivocally of exceptional quality, containing research that has considerably advanced its study (and often, even opened up whole new sub-fields).
Furthermore, there are plenty of benign reasons for the propagation of errors in citations: sometimes, for instance, you might simply copy a reference to a paper you know well from one you’re reading at the moment, and if that’s flawed, you’ll likely copy the flaw; scholars also often have databases of often-used references, and anything flawed in there will be flawed in all papers with that particular reference; such flaws may even exist in the publicly-accessible cite databases, such as INSPIRE or simply google scholar; in physics, many papers are pre-published online on the arXiv, and references entered there after publication may also be flawed; and finally, sometimes, the same mistake may crop up independently, like common typos from juxtaposing letters, a rare variant of a name being misspelled as its more common form, etc.
So again, we have the same muddled logic. While the premise, if (field of human activity) had no value, then (hallmark of valuelessness) would be present, may be perfectly correct, just ascertaining the presence of what I called the ‘hallmark of valulessness’ does not license us to conclude that whatever field of human endeavour we are considering has no value.
It may be true that if all modern art is crap, then it is indistinguishable from ape drawings, but logically, the failure to distinguish it from ape drawings does not entail modern art is crap. Likewise, it may be true that if art is crap, it just follows the laws of money, but that it does does not mean it’s necessarily crap if it does. Also, shoddy research will include copied cites with errors, but that research contains cites with errors doesn’t mean it’s crap. It’s all the same logically invalid argument structure (affirming the consequent, for those who are into naming these things).
I think that’s a very good way of art reception, however, I think one has to be careful to not consider this some ‘one size fits all’-scheme, because whenever you propose such a scheme, somebody’s gonna come up with a piece of art that is art precisely through defying this scheme. (It’s a bit like when you try to come up with the biggest set, somebody can just take its powerset and construct a bigger one.)
So, while I consider that all of these things to be very important elements of my more nebulous notion of ‘context’, I think it’s not exhausted by them, nor that they need even all be meaningfully present. You can construct art in which the artist explicitly takes themselves out of the equation, such as through various aleatoric means, where what you see in the object is entirely what you project into it. There also is art without any aesthetic appeal, and art where the craft aspect is negligible—in fact, I think a good example for all three is again Duchamp’s fountain: the artist had no part in creating it, it’s simply ‘found’; it isn’t especially aesthetically pleasing, nor does it provoke any great aesthetic judgments; and while its construction does presuppose a certain craft, it’s not that craft that makes it a piece of art. That’s roughly why I consider it such an important work.
Perhaps another analogy to explain my way of looking at art. Most of us have had the experience of finding a sunset quite pretty. But ultimately, what makes it pretty? It’s nothing but a collection of colors and vague shapes. What, then, makes a painting of a sunset pretty? It’s not the fact that it is a painting of a sunset, since the prettiness is not intrinsic to the sunset itself, but is our judgment of it. The painting, too, is just colors and shapes. But this is true of any painting, whether it purports to represent something or not. What makes them pretty—or interesting, or abhorrent, or inspiring, or even good or bad—is what makes us human. Thus, any study of art is the study of the human condition, and art, precisely by being dependent on this human context, is what reflects this condition back on us.
There is no One True Way. This is just my attempt at a more flexible framework, because I was long ago forced to conclude that “Good Art vs. Bad Art” is completely inadequate. It’s still evolving, but the basic idea seems to serve me well in general.
To clarify, when I refer to the aesthetic factor, I am using the term in a very fundamental sense: does this thing evoke feelings in a person who experiences it? It’s not a value judgement as to how pretty the thing is, or what kind of feelings it evokes. If the fountain does nothing more than cause someone to experience a period of WTF confusion, it has fulfilled an aesthetic function with regard to that viewer. It’s not pretty, but it made them feel something.
Things can certainly be aesthetic without any artistic action behind it. I am easily transfixed by a starry sky, for example; for whatever reasons, it inspires a complex stir of emotions in me. However, found art does, as you say, involve contextualization; I submit that the actions the artist takes to provide the context–from subject selection and composition to actually placing it in a gallery or museum–are factors that I would generally consider as part of my “craft” evaluation. It’s not just about how smooth you can make a brushstroke–or in this case, your ability to make a urinal, I suppose–it’s about how well the finished piece corresponds to what the artist was trying to present to people.
All that aside, there are certainly pieces where one axis or another is of minimal importance, and I don’t claim that any of the axes cover every consideration. I am not an artist, art critic, or any other sort of art scholar myself, and I don’t pretend that my approach is all that sophisticated or comprehensive. (In fact, as an engineer, perhaps I shouldn’t even be shooting my keyboard off about it. ;)) I’m just trying to establish a framework that helps me maintain perspective about art I encounter; something I can use to think about a piece outside of my immediate subjective reaction to it. It’s about not being the sort of person who dismisses a piece of art just because it has no particular emotional resonance for me, personally–or has one that I dislike. The fact that the piece doesn’t succeed with me doesn’t mean that it won’t be successful with other people.
And if you know positions of all of the molecules in a lottery machine you can predict the winning numbers. However, a winner of this lottery is still merely lucky, isn’t he?
Westerfield also came up with an explanation how girls fingerprints got onto his recreational vehicle. Why should I trust you explanation why you citation carries a fingerprint of someone else’s misprint any more than I trust Westerfield?
That’s missing the point. The assertion is that because it can be modelled by a statistical model, this model faithfully captures what actually goes on, i.e. that there is actually a random process acting at the bottom. But this, as I’ve explained, is fallacious.
No. I arrived at that belief because of knowing the amount of research inspired and derived from these papers. This is different from the case of art: there are independent, objective metrics to gauge the quality of research. If entire technologies and industries are founded on the findings of a paper, then it can legitimately be considered more important than a paper from which nothing ever comes. In this case, the proof’s in the pudding, because science leads to things that either work, or don’t; and if they work, then it’s good science. Even directly after their being published, you can generally tell bad from good papers, and almost always spot excellent ones (case in point: the Pusey-Barrett-Rudolph theorem, published not even two years ago, was hailed as a major breakthrough even when it was only available in preprint form; and indeed, it has accumulated well over 100 citations since then, which is quite a lot in the field). But the shoddy statistical model fails to account for this, and thus, fails to account for the actual practice of research.
First of all, I kinda resent you comparing me to a child murderer. Second, again, you are missing the point: the wrong conclusion in your argumentation depends essentially on there not being any alternative explanation; that is, it follows only that the research is shoddy if some characteristic is present if there is no other explanation for the presence of that characteristic. So my ability to give other explanations just shows the argument to be invalid, regardless of whether or not you believe them.
I also kind of took exception to their statement that King has provided nothing of literary value. I don’t agree. Stephen King is a fine writer.
The question was further skewed by using selections from Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which contains some of the most turgid prose ever, but intentionally (as the Artist as a Young Man was pompous, jejune, and generally full of himself).
Finally, only mediocre writers are ALWAYS at their best. Neither one of these is a mediocre writer.
(I have an MA in comparative literature which enables me to discourse on these things. Well, actually, anybody can discourse on them…)
Also, when it comes to art it turns out that I prefer the works of the dog Tillamook Cheddar to Robert Motherwell (which I recognized as the work of an artist but which I don’t recognize as art).
Just read what you wrote previously. Perhaps you had in mind one thing but wrote something completely different.
Do you feel quite sure of that?
And what industries do you expect to spring out from that Pussy?
Apparently upon its appearance in arxiv the paper was hailed in blogosphere.
The model of random-citing scientists is very simple. It does not take into account blogosphere. However, the same copying process in blogosphere can account for preprint’s success.
People used citation counts to measure the quality of scientific papers well before the development of the model of random-citing scientists. The reason given was that highly cited paper must be very good because so many people cited it. Therefore the explanation you propose is old. It was the model of random-citing scientists which offered an alternative explanation. So it is the people who use citation index who should defend their practices.
Finally, how can you call anything shoddy after you defended art that looks like ape work?
Reasonably so, yes; but more importantly, as I’ve said, it can be backed up by evidence, viz. the amount of research and innovation generated.
Your wit continues to dazzle.
No. The preprint was reported on because several established scientists and philosophers of science felt it was a big breakthrough. And it is, quite objectively, as it solves a question many people had been interested in for a long time. The fact that these are the sorts of papers that get widely cited, and not some minor technical advance, is what throws a spanner in the works of the ‘random citing’ model. Again, just because something can be modelled by a stochastic process, doesn’t mean it follows a stochastic process, and to assert it does is an elementary confusion between the map and the territory, so to speak.
Well, how can you claim that there’s no difference between shoddy and good science, and use a scientific paper to bolster that claim? That’s basically shooting yourself in the foot, don’t you think?
[QUOTE=Half Man Half Wit]
But that doesn’t mean that whatever they bring onto a canvas is incapable of invoking a reaction. Who painted it intending what needn’t matter
[/QUOTE]
If you believe the above, how can the following be true?
[QUOTE=Half Man Half Wit]
if a piece of art, placed in its proper context, fails at what it set out to accomplish, then it fails as a piece of art.
[/QUOTE]
If the intention of the piece doesn’t matter (as you state in the first quote) then how can any piece “fail at what it set out to accomplish”?
By your definition of bad art, if the intention of the piece doesn’t matter, there is no bad art.
[QUOTE=Half Man Half Wit]
Again, why do you think a particular melody is beautiful? Is it an objective quality of the melody that makes it beautiful, or could somebody with a different cultural background or neural wiring perceive it as profoundly disharmonious? Is one set of tones just objectively better than another when played together?
[/QUOTE]
I think the issue many have with modern art is not that some people find it pleasing and some people find it non-pleasing. As you say, the same holds for music and other areas of human life.
The issue that bothers people is that some pieces are considered “masterpieces” made by “geniuses” and people pay millions for them, even though a monkey or a dog can produce pieces with a similar aesthetic appeal to any viewer who doesn’t know it’s from a monkey or a dog.
To see why this behavior might bother some people, let’s apply it to the example that you brought up: music. Assume the following
[ul]
[li]Through legislation or through technological means, only one person can own a piece of music and play it whenever they like. [/li][li]Some pieces of music will please some people while other pieces will please other people. Assume though that there are some pieces of music that are considered masterpieces, and music critics characterize their creators as geniuses, and those pieces sell for millions of dollars to millionaire music collectors.[/li][li]Assume furthermore that someone has shown that pieces produced in some way by monkeys, dogs, or chickens, sounded so similar to the masterpieces that they were almost indistinguishable to the ones produced by the genius humans[/li][/ul]
In the above scenario, would some people not find it funny that there are people in the music scene that spend their lives and money on something that a dog can just as easily produce?
FWIW, I like abstract art and have it in my house. But I would not pay millions for it no matter how much money I had, and I will not engage in art criticism of it (“what does this brush stroke symbolize?”). I find it aesthetically pleasing, and that should be (IMO of course) end-all-be-all for art: Is it aesthetically pleasing to the people in the era and geographical area in which it was made? People have hijacked this original purpose and that is why I believe some people are bothered by the modern art movement and the attendant art-criticism circus.
And when I said that typically, more good than bad papers are among the highly cited ones—in contradiction to your claim that there’s no difference between the two, and in disagreement with your statistical model—you implied that I only considered some papers to be good because they are highly cited. So which one will it be? Either your model doesn’t work, or you can’t tell good from bad research, making your claims meaingless. Or is it that only you can tell good from bad papers, and I lack the necessary faculties?
I said ‘needn’t matter’, not ‘doesn’t matter’. It can be appropriate, I believe, to judge art by intent, if that intent is expressly part of the context. If somebody intended to produce something pretty, and ended up making something ugly, they failed, and in that context, the piece of art is a failure; that doesn’t mean that it can’t be interesting in another context, however. Or take a poem, where the writer clearly attempted to be deep, put produced only shallow metaphors and common places; since the poem presupposes this context to a certain extent, it will be hard to find anything of value within it.
Taking the music example, disharmonious chords are nearly unanimously considered to sound ‘bad’, and it’s really hard to transcend that context, since it’s so deeply rooted in human nature and even physiology, and create the right environment for a positive reception.
My point merely is that the lack of objective criteria doesn’t imply an all-out relativism, just as how the lack of objective moral principles doesn’t necessarily imply moral relativism. Even if morality is just a social judgment or even part of our hard-wired machinery, doesn’t mean that ‘anything goes’ and there’s no value in acting morally. It’s perhaps superficially the hardest position to defend, but in my opinion, the extremes simply don’t work—there’s nothing that could conceivably have set absolute moral values, and even if there were, then that would not be above questioning, either; likewise, there is no law of the universe or objective principle that you can use to mark certain pieces of art as ‘good’ and others as ‘bad’. On the other end of the scale, absolute moral relativism simply doesn’t lead to a stable society, and an aesthetical relativism would be, well, boring.
What people pay how much money for isn’t, in general, a terribly good indicator of its wealth. But if there is an aesthetical judgment associated to the music produced by dogs and apes, and if music engendering a similar aesthetic judgment is something people want to pay millions for, then they should pay a similar amount for the dog or ape-works, no?
FWIW, I consider the amount of money paid for art—all art—to be in general insane, and an instance of magical thinking: I can derive the same pleasure from a good reproduction as from the original; the amount of money paid is justified simply because one was touched by the hand of the master, the other wasn’t. It’s a collector’s market, similar to how some people pay giant sums for old comics or dolls or whatever; the fact that this market is conflated with the appreciation of art is, I think, at the root of many of the misunderstandings regarding modern art.
I finally read the book. So this art was invented by theorists and afterward painted by the artists. Consider the following example. Normally experimental physicists make discoveries which theoretical physicists afterward explain. However sometimes theoretical physicists predict something which experimental physicists afterward confirm. Is there something wrong with the latter scenario?
You’re the one who’s not getting it. The question is not whether some random person can tell the difference. The question is whether actual art aficionados can actually tell the difference. If those who claim to be able to tell the difference cannot do so in controlled settings, that heavily implies that there is no difference.
The whole point is to get beyond exactly the sentiment you’ve given here. You should be able to prove that there is a difference that you can see but he can’t.
Of course, there’s also the argument that there is no such thing as “junk” and that anything can be art. You can argue that art is not about the object but the experience of the viewer. But then you have to wonder why some art is worth a lot of money while other art is not. If everything is art, where does the extra value come from?