Within the tradition that agrees paintings such as Banksy's "Girl with Balloon" has aesthetic value as works of art, then Banksy's "Girl with Balloon" has aesthetic value as a work of art.
Within the tradition that agrees paintings such as Derain's "Drying the sales" have aesthetic value as works of art, then Derain's "Drying the Sails" has aesthetic value as a work of art. — RussellA
The question is, is there such a thing as aesthetic value over and above each tradition. — RussellA
It's a metaphor. Explaining art is philosophy, — frank
philosophy, which I think is an activity that stands apart from language games. — frank
Can we measure how much does the artwork plant a growing seed? — Fire Ologist
I disagree with Witt and so could agree with you that philosophy stands apart from language games because philosophy really is about the real world distinct from its language. — Fire Ologist
Some people think classical music is the most beautiful kind of music. Some think baroque music is the most beautiful kind of classical music. Some people think Vivaldi wrote the most beautiful Baroque music, while others think it was Bach. There is no standard by which the judge these things.The question is, is there such a thing as aesthetic value over and above each tradition.
— RussellA
Yes, that's what I was trying to get to. If someone denies this, would you say they are a relativist about aesthetic value tout court? — J
There is no standard by which the judge these things. — Patterner
It's just a temporal agreement, but in order for a standard to function we'd both have to understand and agree to it. — Moliere
Why these people, and not the butchers of the same time period? — Moliere
I expect their conversations to be much more rich and complicated than my toy example of a standard. — Moliere
Is this an institutional argument like Danto? — AmadeusD
I'm trying to understand how we could have a standard, rather than an amorphous, temporal agreement about what's good without naming it... So, the standard would just be the actual reactions, in aggregate, of listeners.
That said, I see all the problems with this when it comes to modern music and how it's sold. — AmadeusD
The criteria of "lively" is not objective. Some don't like lively. It doesn't seem right that somber music lovers would never get anything they love on the list of "good music".There is no standard by which the judge these things.
— Patterner
Sure there is. Let's say that a composer which is lively is a composer which is good. We'll have some identifying criteria for what we mean by "lively", and thereby come to judge a composer as good. — Moliere
Your preference is all it is. I can understand that you like music with certain characteristics, and possibly predict which compositions you will like. But that's not the same as saying those compositional are "good," or that I like them.One way to think on this with your examples -- perhaps there's a way of understanding why someone would say "Vivaldi wrote the most beautiful Baroque music" and why someone would say "Bach wrote the most beautiful Baroque music". I may have a preference for one or the other, — Moliere
I'm a baroque fan in general, and Bach in particular. Vivaldi was one of his influences, so we can compare them easily enough.but there's an attitude I can adopt to both in seeing why they're the ones we are considering in the first place: they're both good! And what is this goodness? Why these people, and not the butchers of the same time period? — Moliere
Your preference is all it is. I can understand that you like music with certain characteristics, and possibly predict which compositions you will like. But that's not the same as saying those compositional are "good," or that I like them.
but there's an attitude I can adopt to both in seeing why they're the ones we are considering in the first place: they're both good! And what is this goodness? Why these people, and not the butchers of the same time period?
— Moliere
I'm a baroque fan in general, and Bach in particular. Vivaldi was one of his influences, so we can compare them easily enough. — Patterner
On Danto -- yes! That's a sort of "beginning" for my thinking on the categorical question of art. — Moliere
You probably know that Danto, in addition to promulgating his theories about the artworld, offered a frankly Hegelian picture of what art is. — J
It involves a move which is philosophical -- a process by which art comes to understand itself, to eliminate all the things that art is not. He showed, I think convincingly, that we can no longer equate art with any physical substrate, any thing which art must be in order to qualify. Art is a way of seeing; we declare what is art, we don't discover it. The "we" here is the subject of much debate, naturally. — J
(This applies to all the arts, not just visual arts, so substitute "way of hearing" for music.)
...what I want to focus on is the aesthetic judgment of the philosophy itself. — Moliere
Does the aesthetic transcend reason? — Moliere
But then I wouldn't think that these ways are exactly ways of aesthetic judgment -- rather they are dealing with the usual problems of knowledge.
We generally don't reason about our actions in a deductive manner, and doing philosophy is an activity.
Such as the elegant, the rational, the clear, and other such adjectives often applied to philosophical arguments and thoughts.
Such as the elegant, the rational, the clear, and other such adjectives often applied to philosophical arguments and thoughts.
Sure, but my point was that, within each respective tradition, non-relative aesthetic judgments can be, and are, made. — J
How could a tradition develop its aesthetic criteria in such a way that D and B can both be given a fair look? I'm not saying this can't be done; the "how" is what interests me. — J
This all to say that things like marketing (propaganda), access, appearance, in-group considerations and many other things contribute to what seems like an objective standard of "This many people enjoy this artist". — AmadeusD
I'm not sure I understand the showing you describe, though: That we can no longer equate art with any physical substrate, any thing which art must be in order to qualify. The latter part makes sense to me, it's the "any physical substrate" that has me wondering what that means, or if it's not that special and just a turn of phrase. — Moliere
Yes, within the aesthetic tradition that Banksy is a great artist, then the non-relative judgment may be made that Banksy is a great artist.
But within the aesthetic tradition that Banksy is not a great artist, then the non-relative judgment may be made that Banksy is not a great artist. — RussellA
I'm not convinced, though you're getting at something important, which is that a description of a tradition or a practice is incomplete without an explanation of how to make value judgments within that tradition — J
Aesthetics and ethics involve a direction of fit such that we change the world to match how we want things to be. This should be read as the reverse of what we do when talking about how things are, when we change the words we use to match how things are.
So an aesthetic opinion. will amount to a choice we make in our actions. Vanilla over chocolate. The preference is individual - we do not expect others to agree, and are happy for her to have chocolate rather than vanilla.
Ethics differs from this in that we do expect others to comply. Not kicking puppies is not just a preference - not just my choice, but a choice I expect others to make, too.
Given this framing, we can address the place of aesthetics in philosophy,
Some bits of philosophy are about how things are. On these, we should expect some general agreement. Other bits of philosophy may be how we chose things to be. And we might variously expect that others will agree, an ethics of philosophy; or we might simply be expressing our own preference: an aesthetics of philosophy.
There's a start. — Banno
If you "know it to be true," regardless of demonstration or argument, enough said. — J
Right, more a turn of phrase (mine, not Danto's). It's meant to suggest the usual circumstances under which someone will point and say, "That can't be art because it isn't made of the right stuff, or made correctly." Danto argues that Duchamp and his ready-mades began the demonstration against this view, and Warhol put it permanently to bed. Conceptual art, too. — J
This conclusion deeply annoys people who equate art with a craft or skill. And it leaves a serious question -- what is techne, in the arts, if it can't be equated with art itself? I've written about this in various posts, relating to my practice as a musician. I think Danto is right and I'm upset that I can now make music without mastering skills that used to be de rigueur. My "art object" is not "made of the right stuff," according to the old view. It may be indiscernible nonetheless, compared to something that is made of the right stuff, and isn't that enough? But the difference in process, in the act of creating, is damn well discernible to the artist, and I don't like it.
Even our reasoned deductions are based on aesthetic preferences. — RussellA
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