Sure, but that doesn’t mean that tattoos are a sacred cow dearly cherished by the community at large, it’s just a pop culture trend that a significant number of people don’t care for. Saying “I don’t like mini-skirts!” isn’t skewering a sacred cow. Saying “Rosa Parks was a rude old bitch!” or “fuck the polio vaccine!”, now that’s skewering a sacred cow.
No, that is just untrue. One opinion about art can be more or less valued by a person or persons than another opinion. You can decide that this opinion is more valuable to you than another opinion, but there is no reasonable way to say that one opinion is more valuable than any other, outside of some other person’s opinion of those opinions.
Art is all opinion, there is no other realm in which it lives or can live.
That’s because, certainly with respect to anything that can be called “art”, there is simply no such thing as “good” and “bad”, outside of a human being’s opinion. What’s “good” in your opinion can be crap in mine, as has been established with crystal clarity in the post that this one is derived from.
Is Shakespeare a great writer? A bunch of people who, according to you, have “valuable” opinions say so. But note clearly the circularity: You decided that those people’s opinions were valuable, and so therefore their opinions of Shakespeare must be right? Sorry, I don’t see any reason why their opinions are of any particular value, and so their opinion of Shakespeare carries no special weight with me.
The only way they can be right about Shakespeare is if I hold the opinion that their opinions are valuable, which by definition is an opinion. But if my opinion of what’s a valuable opinion is not itself valuable, then . . . hold on, I got lost; how did we decide who had the valuable opinion again? Oh yeah, you said their opinions were valuable. But since your opinion of the value of their opinions is no more valuable than my opinion of the value of their opinion, their opinion is not valuable to me because your opinion that makes their opinion valuable is not valuable. To me.
See how it all comes down to opinion?
So it’s OK that I think your opinion that The Sopranos is a low point in TV must be based on you never having watched Everbody Loves Raymond? Or the idea that the purpose of the show is to make the “worst” criminals human is silly because, well, they ARE human, and it’s interesting to watch how evil and screwed up some humans are? God forbid criminals be shown as HUMAN! :eek:
Ditto on the Buffy episode “The Body.” Worst hour of TV? Are you aware that Paris Hilton has a TV show?
Or that you’re wrong that Shakespeare is only considered the best because he was first? First at what? You don’t think he had contemporaries and antecedents? Why aren’t we studying Kit Marlowe in every American high school?
I think when you expresss opinions lacking in factual basis, or so riddled with hyperbole, they become… silly.
You can have whatever opinions about my opinions that you want. The simple point remains that you are no more right than I am regarding a question such as whether The Sopranos is better than Everybody Loves Raymond. There just IS NO right or wrong about something that lives solely in the realm of opinion.
Why on God’s green Earth is such a simple concept so hard for some people to accept?
Why aren’t we studying Kit Marlowe in every American high school? Because the opinion that Shakespeare is a great writer and Marlowe is not is shared by a lot of the people who make the decisions regarding what should be taught in school.
But a widely shared opinion of relative quality still is no more right than a thinly shared one, it’s just widely shared.
Now, if you want to define “right” as that which is opined by the most people, then DiCaprio’s “Titanic” is a far, far better movie than “Citizen Kane”. Oh, but I forgot, it’s only the valuable opinions that count. And who decides which opinions are valuable? It’s turtles all the way down.
And by the way, I watched most of Paris Hilton’s first TV show. The death of Buffy’s mom still stinks more. I watched “Hee Haw” when I was a child. The death of Buffy’s mom still stinks more. I tried watching an episode of “Cavemen” once. The death of Buffy’s mom still stinks more.
You can say I have no taste, and that’s fine, but trying to say I’m wrong in some way is just, in your words, silly. I have a differing opinion, no more right and no more wrong than yours.
The polio vaccine is not a sacred cow. It’s not something we all look up to and admire and accept unquestioningly. The damned thing works. It’s been proven to work. That post was a joke. And it was funny.
The Rosa Parks thing is a skewering of a sacred cow.
I just wanted to add: isn’t it interesting how this has come about. A thread was started for the purpose of attacking sacred cows. Then a number of people have pointed out how pretty much everything that’s been attacked isn’t really a sacred cow, because there’s no shortage of people who agree with the attack.
Did I manage to find the only real sacred cow? Why are some people so adamant, so absolutely attached to the idea that opinions about the relative value or goodness of things artistic can be right and wrong? A sacred cow if I’ve ever seen one; an idea that is so entrenched that one cannot even entertain the possibility that it’s not just true, and that anyone who disagrees with you is just . . . I actually don’t know what Maeglin or Rubystreak would call me. Deluded? Misguided? Just ignorant? Needing to be educated as to what’s right?
You don’t think the fact that the Sopranos offered something unique counts for anything? I mean, OK, you don’t like it. That’s a completely legitimate sentiment and I would never respond to it. But to say that The Sopranos is the low point of TV? Based on what? I mean, like I said, Paris Hilton has a TV show. Jerry Springer. Geraldo Rivera opened Al Capone’s empty vault on live TV. You don’t think those shows could be said to represent lower points of TV due to showing vile or idiotic REAL LIFE human behavior?
Also, your reason for your opinion, which is that The Sopranos showed criminals as human beings, seemed like a dopey reason. Of course they’re humans. No one is 100% evil. But if you say that show engendered any real sympathy for them or glorified their lifestyle, I might have to respond that you probably didn’t really watch the show.
Why is it so hard to understand that when you employ absurd hyperbole, your opinions become much harder to respect?
You said Shakespeare was first. That was not an opinion. It was factually incorrect.
Can you explain why you think so? Because frankly, I think you’re yanking the chain of what you preceive to be the cult of Joss Whedon, which definitely does exist. But when you’re saying something is the worst, that’s a pretty quantitative statement and it seems much more of a false, contrived opinion than “I think it sucked bigtime, I hated it, it was a waste of time.” No one could really argue with that. But worst? All-time worst? I think it’s a silly thing to say. Also, you wasted an awful lot of time watching the all time worst TV show ever.
I say you have no taste. 
Roadfood, I was responding to pravnik’s examples.
There just aren’t that many sacred cows out there anymore. 
You have made factual errors in some cases, couched in “opinion.” You’ve also engaged in some flagrant hyperbole. Those things cannot be protected by “it’s my opinion, so shut up!” It’s not about me telling you what’s right. It’s about you stating things that are provably untrue.
I forgot to mention this gem:
How about the U.S. Constition, which Jefferson wrote having been influenced by such useless masturbators as John Locke?
This is what I mean about opinions. You can say that you don’t like it. No one can argue with that. But that’s not what you’re saying. It’s like you WANT people to argue with you because of the extremity of your opinion, which undermines its credibilty. But hey, that’s just my opinion. You can’t prove it’s wrong.
I agree with the point about Locke, but Jefferson didn’t write the US Constitution…
Duh. Complete brain fart. Declaration of Independence. :o
Though now that I’ve mentioned it, there’s Rousseau and the Constitution…
Er… :o
I kinda misunderstood the point of Scissorjack’s thread. (And screwed up on the not replying thing, too.) I hadn’t seen this response thread until tonight, so I missed your post. (Of course, Scissorjack has screwed it up at least once, that I can recall.)
I was actually trying to write a satirical post mocking a position I’ve heard from some people about the relative value between live music and recorded music. And I seem to have failed. Skewering, and reducing to absurdity, a position I’ve often heard about live vs. recorded music.
Oh, as long as I’m here…
I can’t argue the flaws you listed for the show.
But to claim Star Trek is even in the running for the title of stupidest show ever is to engage in some pretty severe memory editing.
Because I don’t care to go through a list of every “What were they smoking?!?” show from the last 60 years, I’ll confine myself to just one counter-example:
Just a brief interjection as Moderator: Please remember that different people will have different takes on art/entertainment, and the personal insults are not permitted in this forum. You can disagree with someone without insulting them.
Y’all are doing fine with this, I just thought a reminder might be in order.
Now, as a poster (not a moderator): Roadfood, you seem to think that a “sacred cow” means that EVERYONE else worships it, but only one person can say that the emperor has no clothes. In today’s world, and especially on these message boards, I doubt that you’ll ever find anything in the field of arts/entertainment that everyone agrees on. So, there’s always going to be a sizeable minority. That doesn’t mean the icon isn’t a true “sacred cow.”
I did catch on that the polio vaccine post was a joke. That guy’s never serious! 
Roadfood, just out of curiousity, what do you like?
Looks like I missed some of the party here.
I wouldn’t call Roadfood deluded or misguided: just wrong.
There are two threads getting tangled here. My objection is when they get tangled, in other words, when people use their subjective opinions of a work as a yardstick of its quality.
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Taste. Some people have good taste, some people have poor taste. Taste generally comes about through consensus of the producers and consumers of art. Lousy artists with excellent taste are more common, I believe, than the reverse. But taste is neither right nor wrong, and is often completely orthogonal to quality. The fact that Roadfood may not like Shakespeare is a matter of his personal taste. That’s fine. Life is short, and we all have to enjoy what we like and make less time for the rest.
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Quality. There are excellent measures to assess the qualities of works of art. These are products of finely-honed human judgment. A skillful critic can pick apart a work of art to identify its structure, technique, and its way of communicating with other works and artists. Critics’ opinions are not valuable per se. They are valuable when they proceed from an excellent sense of discrimination, bring to bear a deep knowledge of their source material and context, and make use of analytical tools in the proper way to reveal information about a work of art. Anything else is just an “opinion”, occasionally informed, and lands firmly in the realm of taste.
If you don’t know how to use a paintbrush, you fingerpaint. This is usually the work of a child. If you don’t understand the techniques of art analysis, than your raw opinion is the equivalent of fingerpainting and should be given the consideration it deserves. At least you (speaking generally) have an opinion, which is a big step up from “it’s ok, I guess”.
There is dispute about quality and technique just as there is dispute in the hard sciences. We just don’t have quite everything worked out yet. If we did, life would be very boring. But some things are worked out. It is possible to call Shakespeare and Vergil overrated hacks. If you are a particularly brilliant critic, you might set off an interesting storm of controversy and might lead literary analysis down amazing new paths. Your ability to make that argument in the first place is directly related to your mastery of the material.
If you try to make that argument without the mastery, then expect to see a lot of polite nodding and um-hming among people who know better. Holding opinions like this does not make one a maverick; it makes one a fool.
Please don’t compare art criticism/appreciation with how hard science works. There is nothing comparable to scientific method in art criticism/appreciation. Disputes in the scientific world are resolved by experiment, observation, and analysis of the data from same. Newton’s laws do not require you to agree with them for them to be demonstrably true. Shakespeare’s “greatness” relies exclusively on the agreement of readers that he is great.
I think Maeglin and Roadfood are both correct. I fully agree with Roadfood in that art is subjective, and there are no “right” answer to the question, “What is good art?” But there are interesting answers, which is more like what Maeglin is saying. However, the value of an opinion about art is seperate from its conclusion. “Shakespeare sucks,” and “Shakespeare kicks ass,” despite being diametrically opposed, are equally worthless opinions, because they don’t really tell you anything about why Shakespeare alternatively sucks or kicks ass. However, neither of those opinions is wrong in an objective sense. It is possible to mount an educated and reasoned defence of either position.
What I actually said was that just as matters are still very much in dispute in field X, so they are also still in dispute in art. Full stop.
Using a scientific methodology to understand art would be about as effective as using literary criticism to put a man on the moon.
But let’s consider this. There is a lot of scientism around here, and as such, the arts are often compared unfavorably. It is worth exploring.
Newton’s laws are “true” insofar as in most cases, hypotheses they generate have yet to be proven false. They have quite a bit of explanatory and predictive power. The fact that the laws of motion are, in total, the best explanation for many observed phenomena is a result of observation, experiment, and of course, consensus. Alternative explanations are obviously possible, and for them to supplant Newton, they need to fit the data better. Unless you really know what you are doing, it is unlikely that you are going to be able to do this. And as we expand our observational and measurement capabilities, it is far from impossible that this will happen.
The fact that you still fall -9.8m/s^2 out of a tree at sea level whether you “agree” with Newton or not does not make the laws of motion true per se. I’ve never seen a graviton: have you?
“Science” adopts what best fits the data. Likewise art criticism. The data are different, the theories are different, the methodologies are different. But there is far more too it than just the general agreement of readers. That just invites the question of what actually drives the general agreement of readers across truly staggering amounts of time and space? These are the kinds of questions art theory is posed to answer, and this is why people who use the tools well have insights that have value.