demonskul777 said:TheBrainintheJar said:
'If we wanted'? It seems people really want objectivity in the arts. The subject keeps coming up but no one has yet put forward the apparatus that measures art.
I'm sure a lot of people have, but the majority doesn't agree with those proposed scales so they haven't gotten through. That might proof it's ultimate subjectivity to you, but there are also people who don't believe in science.
Every objectivity known to us still is a form of consensus: do we see the same things? We assume so and the majority agrees to that, making observations "objective". "But I can see it. The numbers proof it." If I don't see it does that make me wrong?
Two people (w/ decent vision) are in a room and one person says there is a plant, the other says there is not. Who's right? Basically that kind of thing, except on much larger scale and with 99+% of the people agreeing to seeing it
But as for art the different ideas are just too broad, and those who like specific things for reasons don't want to see those reasons being marked as bad, so the majority is not going to agree on defining quality objectively. I'm 80% sure there is a bare minimum requirement that the majority would agree on, mostly related to the effort the creator put into the work, but nobody will accept an "objective minimum" because it would possibly endanger their other opinions.
On the other hand I do agree with you that for certain works the scale would not be accurate, but for all I care we get multiple scales to judge specific types of works.
Opinions will always exist, even on matters we consider objective, which is, yes, a contradictive statement. However if a person doesn't believe the provided "evidence", then you can do nothing to proof it to them. Objectivity itself at that point becomes a subjective matter, which doesn't work, so we have to believe in a few axiomas here and there. If we would apply that to art it would be all the same.
I'm not disagreeing on art being subjective, but a lot of science used to be considered so as well and we just go along with assumptions, creating a grand-scale agreement that the majority of people now
consider facts.
But that kind of boils down to "does everything really exist" and that's a stupid question so let me be clearer on what I mean:
The objective part of science is the part we observe, the things that exist; however laws, events etc. cannot be observed as well, and defining exactly
how they occure and
whether they exist is pure speculation and might just be wrong. I'm not saying I believe that myself, but it
might be wrong, which means it's not objective. Same goes for studying art: the objective part, is the the part we can study and actually see, and the interpration of those is the subjective part. The difference between the two is that, for science, we assume specific parts are correct, for art we don't.
EDIT: i missed my chance to quote Plato and sound intelligent