No; that’s all there is to it. You’ve spent a lot of time telling us why the agreement of educated readers who have good taste should be of higher value, but that agreement is all that lies at the heart of any artist’s “greatness.”
Ok, see, all of this is fine. You’re not saying to me, “Roadfood, you’re just wrong, The Sopranos IS high quality, in a way independent of your opinion of it.” Your points above are well-taken, and are great reasons for you to think highly of The Sopranos. You’re basically putting forth some of the criteria that you personally (I am assuming) use to judge the quality of something like a TV show.
All I’m saying is that there’s nothing particularly right about those criteria. I have some different criteria that I personally use to make my judgements of quality, and so I arrive at different conclusions.
I acknowledge and apologize for my factual errors. I was speaking off the cuff, and didn’t put a lot of thought into it.
I could try to explain why I have the opinions I do about these things, but it would take a rather long time and, I’m pretty sure, would just devolve into me being piled on and lots of people telling me why I’m totally wrong.
But since you asked so nicely, here’s some off-the-cuffs about why the death of Buffy’s mom is, to me, in my personal opinion, the lowest point on TV. Again, try to keep in mind that these are judgments based on my personal criteria. If your criteria are different, more power to you, but please don’t just tell me how wrong I am because I have different criteria.
Shows like Paris Hilton’s, Hee Haw, Springer, any reality show you care to name, etc., are not aspiring to greatness. They’re low-brow, and pretty much everyone involved knows it. So it’s hard for me to fault them for basically meeting expectations.
Mr. Whedon, in the aforementioned episode, on the other hand, was clearly trying for greatness (again, I remind you that this is in my opinion; if you think he wasn’t trying for greatness, you are as entitled to think that as I am to think what I do). However, he failed miserably. The show was so heavy-handed that there isn’t eve a measure of weight in the English language to compare it to. It manipulated the audience at every turn in very malicious ways. My memory is somewhat fuzzy after all this time, but I remember near the beginning something about the mom getting back with a boyfriend (or something like that), Buffy being all happy for the first time in a long while, coming home in all her happiness, only to have Mr. Whedon stick in the knife and twist it with all the gusto any human being has ever had at deliberately inflicting sudden misery on other human beings by having Buffy then find her mom dead on the couch.
Then we were subjected to, what, 45 minutes or so of the excruciatingly maudlin, bashing-over-the-head-with-a-sledgehammer crap about other characters being told. I remember some scene at the hospital (maybe when Buffy was telling her sister?) where craptastic Whedon filmed the scene through a window, in silence, so we couldn’t hear what was being said, we only saw the character’s reactions. That’s a filmic cliche that’s been overused, and all it served for me was to totally draw me out of the story and make me think about why the stupid writer/director was, yet again, trying to play with the audience.
Now, I can already hear the reactions: “But Roadfood, life is like that sometimes; it’s realistic that sometimes someone is really happy and then has the rug yanked out from under them in a horrible way.” etc. If you think that, and it’s part of why you liked that episode, great, more power to you. But again, I’m using my personal criterial and, real life or not, I thought it sucked more than anything else I’ve ever seen on TV.
And you’re right, I did waste an hour of my life watching the worst hour of television ever. Had I known how godawful it would be beforehand, believe me I wouldn’t have gone near it. But up until that episode, I rather liked Buffy. But it was after being subjected to that utter piece of crap that I stopped watching, and never came back.
Can’t argue with that, relative to your tastes, of course.
I am clearly unable to communicate here, since what you say above is in fact the opposite of what I am trying to express.
Taste and quality are not related, and are often completely orthogonal. Educated readers do not always have good taste. Ancient educated readers who said things of enormous value sometimes had dreadful taste by modern standards.
You are also mistaking cause for effect. You contend that agreement drives greatness. Let’s suppose this is true.
Agreement is either stochastic or it isn’t. If it is stochastic, then greatness is completely random in accordance with whatever distribution you believe creates it.
That this is false is trivial to demonstrate.
If agreement is not stochastic, then something drives agreement. Agreement is the consequence, not the cause. Is a great work not great if nobody consumes it? Did Bach only acquire greatness when he became popular after substantial rediscovery by Mendelsohn? Or was his music still great even while nobody was performing it?
Remember, someone asked, I didn’t volunteer this. Among my favorite TV shows, in no particular order:
Stargate SG-1
Earth, Final Conflict (not counting the final season, which gives the show, to me, the distinction of having fallen the furthest from beginning to end)
Newsradio
Babylon 5
The Dick Van Dyke Show
Due South
Laredo
Whose Line is it Anyway
Prison Break
24
Hill Street Blues
Survivor
Deadliest Catch
Dirtiest Jobs
The Revolution miniseries on the History chanel
Among my favorite movies:
Black Hawk Down
Escape from New York
The Great Escape
Ice Station Zebra
Shrek
Master and Commander
The Terminator 2
Toy Story
Quiz Show
Ice Age
James Bond movies (although the Brosnan ones, not so much)
Later John Wayne movies, especially The War Wagon and Eldorado
Music:
Blue Oyster Cult
Camel
Ambrosia
Jimmy Thackery
Smokin’ Joe Kubek
The Guess Who
Stevie Ray Vaughan
U.K.
Saga
Indigenous
Zebra
Danny Gatton
So now you can REALLY say I have no taste.
But the simple point you are totally failing to see is one meta-level up: Who decided that “excellent sense of discrimination”, “deep knowledge of their source material and context”, etc. are the “right” ways to judge quality? Who decided what the “proper” way is the use analytical tools?
The answer is that people decided those things. And they decided them based on their own personal tastes and opinions about what should be the criteria for judging quality.
That’s what I mean when I say it all comes down to opinion. A bunch of people used their opinions to decree what the proper ways are to determine quality. But what makes THOSE opinions as to what are the propers ways the right opinions?
It is your view, shared by many I’ll admit, that there are proper techniques of art analysis. There is no objective reality, however, in which those techniques are any more proper than anything I may bring to bear.
You’re skirting mighty close to personal attack there. I could use the same adjective to describe someone who cannot grasp the simple fact that any judgement of quality is, by the very nature of “judgement” and “quality”, entirely within the realm of personal opinion. No better,no worse, no more right no more wrong, no more or less worthy of consideration than any other judgement of quality, using whatever different set of criteria the judger may choose.
Another chance to get on my soapbox. Slow news day at work. Examples are purely illustrative.
I know that saying someone has “no taste” is common enough to be correct, it still kind of makes no sense. A person with no taste is generally indifferent among numerous alternatives because he is just not capable of seeing much distinction between them. Very few people have absolutely no taste. Having no taste is not being able to tell wine from vinegar.
Having poor taste does not mean liking what the snobs don’t like. It is not determined by the outcome of your choices, but by how you got there and by the rules you use. Critical to poor taste is not having the courage of your convictions. Having poor taste means not being able to tell the difference between a bottle of wine your friends say is expensive (but has corked) and a decent and very drinkable table wine. You say the expensive wine is better because it is expensive.
Having good taste is having enough experience consuming your subject of choice that you can make finer distinctions between things and make the rules that govern your choices explicit. You know you like oaky Bordeaux more than a fruity grenacha, and you can distinguish easily between the two. You can explain the difference between a Margaux and a Pomerol, and can usually taste the difference, too.
Having exquisite taste comes from enormous experience. You can truly appreciate a $250,000 bottle of Petrus Pomerol. You can drink six glasses of the same from different vintages and can identify them and articulate the differences. Telling the difference between Bordeaux and Napa wine, even when produced from the same grapes and using similar processes, is easy for you. Your rules of taste are exacting and you can support them with massive experience. You know what terroir means.
There is, thankfully, considerable disagreement among people of exquisite taste. But among the most elite wine drinkers in the world, to my knowledge there is no disagreement about the quality of a bottle of Petrus, even by those who do not particularly care for it.
Who “decided” that we are not living in the matrix? Who “decided” that life is not a dream from which we all must someday awake? Who “decided” that green is green and red is red? If you want to challenge every aspect of human judgment epistemologically, knock yourself out.
The same way any other idea that interprets sense experience occurrs: by exploration, articulation, dispute, resolution. This process has been occurring for a remarkably long time. Mill calls this the marketplace of ideas.
If this is an article of faith for you, then this is borderline solipsism. Whatever makes you happy.
First, I was speaking generally. I thought it was very clear that I was not referring to you at all. It was certainly not intended as a personal attack.
Second, you mislabel your axiom of the democratization of opinion. It is clear that you think it is a fact. I get it, but I do not accept it. Fortunately for those who like to consume informed opinion about art, there are enough people out there who feel the need to educate themselves and to think hard before publishing their opinions. If a world where all opinions were created equal were actually fact, this world would probably be a very dull and unattractive place.
No, I think you’re communicating just fine. Your belief that because people disagree with you it must be that you have not properly communicated your point is what’s tripping you up.
This is almost certainly the crux of our disagreement. Taste and quality not only ARE related, they are inseperable; they are essentially the same thing.
Why is the quality of being stochastic or not the defining term of agreement? Agreement is rarely totally random, but how then does it follow that what THAT group agrees to somehow has more validity than what THIS group agrees to?
This, again, is where you’re tripping up. We can agree that agreement is not stochastic. But all that says is that people don’t use random factors in making their personal judgments. It speaks naught to why one judgment is any better or worse, more right or more wrong, more worthy or less worthy, than any other judgement.
There is just no independent greatness to his music at all. People decided that it was great. SOME people decided that it was great using a particular set of criteria that THEY deemed to be the proper way to determine greatness of music.
Let me ask you this: are Jackson Pollock’s paintings great art? If even those who, according to you, have the proper training, education and credentials to be able to judge great art cannot agree on that simple question, how can “greatness” exist outside of opinion?
Wow, you and I live in completely different realities. You honestly, really and truly, deep down in your soul, believe wholeheartedly that there is no difference between the decision as to what constitutes great art, and the “decision” (sorry, I tried to type that without the quotes, but I just can’t) that we don’t live in the matrix? You see no distinction between objectively verifiable reality, and opinions about quality?
Sure, no disagreement there. But you clearly fail to distinguish between the personal and the objective.
From where I sit, it’s exactly the opposite. You cling dearly to your belief that judgments live outside of opinion, and you have nothing to support that. All your arguments are circular. There is no way you can even define “greatness”, with respect to art or wine, without using words that express judgment and opinion.
I did say that you were skirting close, not that you had crossed the line.
As many, long ago, did not accept that the world is round. As some, now, do not accept that man walked on the moon. Accept it or not, doesn’t change the facts. It’s one of those things that separates fact from opinion, and your worldview from mine.
I don’t think so, since that is, in fact, the world we live in. It is only that some people chose to believe that some opinions are more equal than others.
I think there’s something to be said for discussing “The Body”'s position in the Buffy universe. It’s often held up as the best of the best and I gotta agree with Roadfood, it really pales in comparison to most of the other episodes.
Are you trying to be patronizing? If not, no problem. If so, kindly stop.
This is exactly the crux, and this demonstrates exactly why you are misinformed. If this were true, then “quality” and “taste” would correlate almost perfectly. In practice, they don’t. Often not at all. Even in my own experience, I recognize a host of artists whose works have formal properties that I recognize as “quality” though I utterly fail to appreciate their works. I just don’t like them, even though I know they are good. They are just not to my taste.
A work of quality has formal properties that have been consistently identified as “good”, “beautiful”, “original”, “inventive”, “influential”, or one of a host of other things. Whether or not any or all of these qualities applies to a particular piece is a subject of some dispute. It often takes quite awhile to get it figured out, and quite a lot of disputation. Arguments and points of view clash, and in the process, ideas are further refined and the qualities of greatness are clarified. This is the marketplace of ideas.
So how is the product of this marketplace different from everyman’s opinion?
[ul]
[li]It is well informed.[/li][li]It is subject to vigorous scrutiny and dispute by equally well-informed people.[/li][li]It makes specific reference to the formal properties (arrived at by this same process) that are exogenous to the work of art yet the work of art participates in.[/li][/ul]
In no way does it matter whether or not the piece is to the taste of the critic. Like or dislike is irrelevant to a discussion of a work’s formal properties. I do not have a strong appreciation for most of Mozart, for example, but I can take you through why Symphony No. 40 is a great work. This isn’t because I have special mystical knowledge, but because I know a little about sonata-allegro form and about some of the interesting and radical things Mozart does.
Ok, this is a fair question and I will answer it honestly. I do not know. I am not very expert in visual arts in general, and I do know a dispute about Pollock is still raging. But when it is over, speaking simplistically, we will have an answer. There are plenty of well-trained physicists out there, yet still we do not have a unified theory that can generate testable hypotheses. We just don’t know everything, and everything we learn raises more questions. Such is life. Artists like Jackson Pollock push the boundaries of not only great art but art itself, and this is something that needs to be grappled with. You may think this is a simple question, but I think there is hardly universal consensus on this.
Appreciation of art is not axiomatic-deductive. But the alternative to an axiomatic-deductive system is not a completely equalitarian relativism without formal properties, axioms, and logic. There are no rules that are completely self-evident, but the consequence of this is not that one rule is as good as any other.
So, you’re saying there are works out there which you recognize to be quality works, in all their parts, which you still do not like? I’m not sure I buy that. In my experience, at least, while there are works in which I can recognize elements which are (in my opinion) well done, there are often elements which are not well done (again, in my opinion.) If the elements in the second group are either more numerous or more glaring than the elements in the first, I dislike the work, and consider it “poor.” It seems unlikely to me that there would be works which you recognize as having only good qualities, yet which you still do not like.
And Roadfood’s entire point is that those formal properties which you claim point to objective quality, are themselves subjectively arrived at, and are subjective at two different levels: the first being the criteria themselves, the second being wether or not any particular work fulfils those criteria. And the evidence for this subjectivity is the very process of dispute you use to bolster your position. If there were objective criteria, at some point, there would be consensus, again, in terms of what the criteria should be, and then on wether the criteria have been fulfilled. This consensus is never arrived at. The process is never settled. Artists fall in and out of style, and new movements are constantly altering our perception of what “quality” means.
I don’t even see how that could possibly be construed as patronizing, so no, I wasn’t.
But what you, apparently, have either completely lost sight of or truly cannot grasp, is that all of those qualities you mention, “good”, “beautiful”, “original”, “inventive”, “influential”, etc. have – indeed cannot not have – as their basis, some person’s or groups opinion, i.e. taste. That most people can and do separate their personal taste from the group consensus taste, doesn’t change the fact that the group consensus is one of taste.
We will not have an answer that is “true” in any reasonable sense of truth. We will have an answer that the informed and educated of the art world have DECIDED and AGREED is the answer. It won’t be an answer that can be proven in any way, by any definition of that word, it will simply be, no more and no less, than an answer of consensus.
Wow, this is so incredible as to leave me almost speechless. You again seem to actually believe that there is no difference between the consensus of physicists regarding the physical world, and the consensus of art critics regrading great art.
It goes without saying that I agree that we don’t know everything. But here’s reality: there is a realm of the factual, and there is a realm of the opinion. Gravity resides in the former, greatness of art, music, or wine reside in the latter. “True” and “false” reside in the former, but have no meaning in the latter.
At one time, human beings did not know what the smallest particle of matter is. Then came a time when human beings thought that the atom was the smallest particle of matter. Despite the fact that there was great consensus among the educated and informed members of the field, reality did not change. The statement, “The atom is the smallest particle of matter” remained false, no matter what anyone believed or what the agreement was. Experiments were eventually able to prove that. The consensus among the educated necessarily changed to match reality, not the other way around.
Furthermore – and here is one very telling way in which the changing consensus in the factual realm is different than the changing consensus in the opinion realm – once the true reality has been determined, it will never change. The atom is NOT the smallest particle of matter. We now know that and there is no possible way that anything will ever change that fact. No amount of opinion-changing or new experiments or discoveries or theories will ever change the fact that atoms are made of still smaller particles.
Mass resides in the factual. A two-pound rock has more mass than a one-pound rock. But here is where, in some past discussions I’ve had on this subject, some people get tripped up. “But,” they say, “the concept of a pound is just something that humans made up. We all just agree on what defines a pound. So that’s just opinion and agreement ,same as art.” Well, yes and no. True, the specific definition of “pound” is a human invention. Nevertheless, the comparative mass of that which we call a two-pound rock and that which we call a one-pound rock is independent of what we call it, how we measure it, who does the measuring, where the measuring is done, or who believes what. In pounds or kilograms, on the Earth or on the Moon, the two-pound rock has twice the mass of the one-pound rock.
An alien being, living on a planet circling the star Alpha Centauri, would still agree, in whatever units he used, measuring with whatever device or technique he used, that the two-pound rock has twice the mass of the one-pound rock.
That’s factual.
In the realm of opinion resides the question of whether Mozart’s music is great, and whether Shakespeare is a better writer than John Grisham. Put THOSE questions to the alien from Alpha Centauri and see how factual they are.
Except that the very thing you say, “as good as any other”, is a judgment of opinion! People DECIDED what “as good as” means in that context, and if a thousand years from now people decide something different, the entire consensus of the informed, educated opinions could well be that Mozart was a hack, and that the Rolling Stones are the epitome of great music.
This has happened time and time again in the realm of opinion. The informed, educated people, those that you yourself would identify as being in the position to know, say that something is crap, then later say that it’s great. And at both times, there are people like you that would defend to the death the “rightness” of the opinion. But if they are right now, it means they must have been wrong before.
Ok, you say, just like physicists were wrong when they said the atom was the smallest particle.
But as I said up there, nothing can now change that the atom is not the smallest particle. We can prove, objectively, that it’s not. Can the same be said for the greatness of Mozart’s music? Can you say, with certainty, that a thousand years from now it will still be great? Can it be objectively proven, for all time, to be great? or is it the case that, if future generations decide that Mozart really wasn’t all that great, that that will be THEIR reality?
If you can show me how, in anything even remotely resembling an objective way, similar to how the rightness of “the atom is the smallest particle of matter” can be proven once and for all, that the one true rightness of whether Pollock is a great artist of not can be determined, I’m all ears.
Like I said, I never argue if someone says they don’t like something that they’ve given a fair chance. I’m not debating the relative goodness of “The Body.” Notice I haven’t ever given my opinion of it. Saying it was the worst hour of TV ever struck me as an enormously hyperbolic statement. I’ve seen so many horrible things on TV, some of which aspired to greatness, some of which were destined to be shitty from the beginning. “The Body” isn’t anywhere near the worst thing I’ve seen. I can’t imagine how it could be. But hey, chacun a son gout, as Tim Gunn would say.
But Roadfood, you’ve been very cool about explaining your opinions. While I might not agree with them, I respect you for offering them and graciously discussing it with me. I was only joking about you having no taste, in case that slipped by anyone. I don’t even know what that means.
As much fun as this has been, I’m off for a three-day weekend, so I won’t be able to participate until Tuesday, by which time no one will care anymore.
I have, as usual, begun to run off into high levels of verbosity anyway, so I’ll close with something a bit more succinct.
Have you read Isaac Asimov’s “Nightfall”? The stars exist, that’s just a fact. If people don’t believe they exist, they still exist. If people don’t even know they’re there, they still exist. Nothing anyone can do or believe or decide or have an opinion on can ever change the truth of the existence of the stars.
The greatness of Mozart’s music exists solely at the whim of belief. If people stopped believing that it was great, it would cease to be great. If they (and by this I mean those that are educated and informed and all that Maeglin would say gives them the right to judge) started to believe that Tiny Tim’s “Tiptoe through the Tulips” was great, it would become great.
Thanks for the detailed response to my question, Roadfood. Your dislikes seem so diverse I was genuinely curious what your likes were.
as compared to whom exactly? Have you ever actually watched boxing?
Well, I’m back from my weekend at least.
I don’t really want to belabor the point anymore. What Roadfood is saying is by no means complicated, yet he still feels that the fact that I disagree means that I do not “grasp” it. Maybe it would help to step back a little.
We decide “facts” in our ordinary lives on much flimsier and more “subjective” bases than science would require. Guilt or innocence in a courtroom is decided and a factual outcome is delivered by means of a process. Perhaps there is “scientific” evidence, perhaps there isn’t. Either way, human judgment weighs the evidence at hand in order to establish the facts and meaningful decisions are made.
Roadfood, if you design your epistemology in such a way that it is impossible to know anything “factually” save through deduction or induction, well, it’s your life, and clearly reasonable people differ. How “objective” anyone can be, even in precise disciplines, is still very much an open question that scientists and philosophers of science wrangle with, so you will perhaps understand why I find your somewhat pat answers unsatisfying. As far as the stars “existing” whether we like it or not, Ptolemy would have said exactly the same thing.
Do I believe truth can be discovered outside of a purely deductive or inductive context? Yes. Fortunately, enough people across the milennia have felt the same way and were able to spill a great deal of ink on it. If you don’t see the value due to the way you define your personal epistemology, that’s fine too. But you might not want to kid yourself into thinking that your scientism is anything other than purely subjective, and, dare I say, a matter of personal taste.
No, I never said that, please don’t put words in my mouth. It is not that you disagree that indicates that you don’t grasp my point, it is the plain fact that what you say I believe is not what I believe. Here, this quote from further down:
This is an inaccurate representation of my beliefs.
Let me try it in a simple way: There are things in the universe that are simply true, independent of anything humans or any other intelligent life form may think, feel, decide, believe, have an opinion on, etc. There are other things that exist solely in the mind of one or more intelligent beings.
Humans learning of facts has no effect on the facts. They are, whether any human knows the facts or not.
Is there life on a planet circling the star Sirius? I don’t know. I daresay no human on this planet knows. Nevertheless, the question has a factual answer. That we don’t know it doesn’t change that it exists.
Is Shakespeare a great writer or not? There is no factual answer to that question. It requires the application of human judgment to arrive at an answer. The answer simply doesn’t exist outside of what someone or some group thinks.
No, that is incorrect. Human judgment does not, and cannot ever, establish the facts, it can only establish what people believe. Humans can discover facts, but not establish them, despite what our parlance may say. Humans don’t judge and then establish that the stars exist, humans find out that the stars exist. If all people on Earth decided that the stars did not exist, and “established” that there is no such thing as a star, the fact of the stars existence would reman unchanged.
It’s the same in trials, despite the parlance. If Joe is accused of committing some crime, there is a fact as to whether he actually did it or not. The decision arrived at by the jury may or may not agree with that fact. The verdict in the trial is something that people decide. But that twelve people all establish that Joe is guilty has absolutely no relation to the actual fact of whether he actually did the crime. If he is innocent, the jury establishing his guilt does make it a fact that he’s guilty, it means only that people decided to believe that.
Are you arguing differently? Are you saying that you hold that, when the jury finds Joe guilty, it means that his guilt is now a fact? And if a later appeals court reverses the guilty verdict, that reality has now changed so that Joe’s innocence is the new fact? That’s just silly.
Facts are, they just are, they exist, and they are and always will be independent of anything that humans decided.
As opposed to opinions about things like greatness of art, or the quality of wine, which have no existence as facts and reside solely and totally in the realm of what people decide and establish.
Which means, what, exactly? That you agree or disagree?
You really like putting labels on things, don’t you? My “epistemology”, my “scientism”. My “scientism”, as you call it, is hardly subjective, quite the opposite, as I’ve explained at length. I don’t define reality. And neither do you. It exists, independent of what you or I believe. The greatness of Shakespeare does not.