There IS accounting for taste. Or not. Or maybe yes.

[Archangel]

jj brought this up in the Metallica poll, of all places, and I decided to run with it.

Now, I think we're all on the same page when I say that in the vast majority of cases, taste is indeed a wholly subjective matter.
If someone told you that he didn't like your favourite band/movie/comic book for such and such reasons, you wouldn't necessarily think less of the guy, unless you were a fanboy, which in turn would make you stupid. My girl, my friends, my parents and I have wildly differing tastes in almost everything: But in most cases, I understand where they're coming from, and respect their opinion, even though I do not share it.

However, I'd like to think that there are certain things which transcend the limits of mere subjective taste, and cross into a realm of a more universal, objective appreciation. If you tell me that you think the Smashing Pumpkins suck because their lyrics are whingey and their guitar work is at times repetitive, and that you prefer band so-and-so for that reason, more power to you; however, if you tell me that you think Beethoven sucks, I will laugh at you and think you're an idiot. Don't get me wrong, you can bring forth plenty of arguments why, say, Mozart was superior to him; but in my mind, at least, there are some works of mankind which separate people by their ability to appreciate them, not the other way around.

One of the reasons, of course, is that on a subjective level, we can like something in spite of - or even due to - its faults. And the less faults there are, the more universal appreciation becomes. That much is obvious. You can understand why somebody may think that your girlfriend isn't the hottest thing on legs, even though she is supremely beautiful to you; on the other hand, you would look rather suspiciously upon someone who flat out told you that Giorgia Palmas was a horrid minger. Again, as with Beethoven and Mozart, you can argue about whether or why she is or isn't more beautiful than Eva Mendes, but the general consensus among those who appreciate female beauty appears to be that both are seriously bonerific, and we consider those who disagree to be abnormal.


But that only brings us to the deeper issues.


Because, see, who determines what a flaw is? It's one thing to discuss female beauty standards, but let's bring this back on topic, to art. It's easy to say that Mozart is more universally appreciated than The Arctic Monkeys because beyond the realms of media, marketing, and personality-cult based sub-culture, his music has less flaws, is more, for lack of a better word, perfect: but where exactly does the differentiation between flaw and perfection come from? Who decides what a flaw is, and why he would have us consider it thus? Who determines where the watershed lies, where triviality is transcended, and whether those limes are rigid or fluid, porous, open to taste? Is appreciation learned, or innate? Are those historical and social conventions? Is it an issue of science, about how certain harmonies resonate within us and certain cacophonies are repulsive to us, or does it go deeper than that, into something more... metaphysical?

Because while we have stated at the beginning that there are trivial things open to debates on taste, and significant, universal things above discussion on quality and significance, the fact remains that even at the most universal levels, subjectivity is very much alive and kicking (take that, logic!). You can state absolutely that Titian is superior to Bob Ross, and everybody will nod their heads, if only out of fear of appearing uncultured; but proclaim the same thing about, dunno, Titian and Raphael, and many an eyebrow will be raised. So even in the province of universal beauty, there is no such thing as the absolute. We can all agree that Shakespeare is good: We can not agree at all that he is better than Goethe or Sophocles. One reason for this is that when looking at art as mimesis, perfection is a priori impossible. On a metaphysical level, art is the reproduction, by flawed beings, of an imperfect nature which itself imitates a perfect idea. So those more likely to ignore or prefer what vestigial imperfections there are in a certain great work are eo ipso more likely to prefer it over another...
So is that why art, which is twice removed from the ideal, often strike us as more perfect than nature? Isn't a more profound subjectivity, something beyond trivial taste, the only answer for this? That by being shot through the human prism, art evokes in us a notion - felt rather than known - of kinship, of some atavistic knowledge that the ideal can only hold meaning for us when glimpsed by human senses?


So taste is a funny thing, isn't it. It lets us go nuts over mundane, trivial, essentially and fundamentally flawed things, while at the same time giving us the ability to admire that which is truly great; but even on the highest pinnacles of Parnassus and Helicon, in the very presence of Apollo, it fights to preserve individuality, refuses to give up the idea that there isn't an absolute which judges us, but that all judgement is quintessentially human, that all objective perfection is essentially worthless unless it is perceived as such.

[Da Raider]

I never thought Arch abused drugs...until now.

[Archangel]

I do feel like a beer, actually.

[kid_vidrio]

You look like a beer too.

As for the topic, taste is subjective, quality is more universal but still given to socially contrived standards.

[freegood]

I think JJ asked this in the old forums too, but there's so much to play with.

Oh yeah, we are very flawed beings. Each of us are like shattered mirrors with our own dysfunctions and peculiarities. Yet we all are framed and confined into social and cultural masks, no matter how hard we resist it. There are some who look towards nature's permanence to find meaning and grounding, but art is our gift to ourselves.

I would agree with the notion that "by being shot through the human prism, art evokes in us a notion - felt rather than known - of kinship, of some atavistic knowledge that the ideal can only hold meaning for us when glimpsed by human senses", and I have more to add upon it. It's that uncanny ability to resonate with each piece of our shattered psyche and reflect a more perfect picture. One could even say that what makes art great is how the work takes upon a mask of itself, yet it still maintains to shine through....a desire we hope for privately and is validated with the "perfect" work.

Perfection and taste is fleeting and fickle, and alas, the social and cultural recognition of this uncomfortable realization has, imo, destroyed the values and standards to permanence...or immortality of greatness. We have traded that immortality of greatness for the permanence of statistics and factoids. Might as well call burning down the Temple of Artemis art instead of arson....but I digress.

I notice that there are some songs that I initially dislike when I listen through a whole album, only to appreciate it more when I'm forced to listen it while driving. There's definitely different orders of taste that we sometimes don't realize or admit (in the form of guilty pleasure). Maybe me concentrating on the road allowed a different part of the brain to marinate inside the song. Or it could be that the water drawn from the root has reached the leaf at that moment.

[The Dude]

i don't care what anyone says, the madonna covered in shit is not art

[kid_vidrio]

i don't care what anyone says, the madonna covered in shit is not art

[Yelram]

Okay, time to play devils advocate.

Beethoven sucks, and heres why(I dont really thing his music "sucks" just bear with me).
He's got hours upon hours in his musical repertoire, some very very brilliant motifs and ideas, most of them built upon breaking "rules" set by the Bach era. And what is he remembered for?
Ode to joy - A total diatonic melody in a major key, a fucking 3rd grader could have wrote it.
There are obviously others that are well known, but the point i'm trying to make here is that sometimes a virtuoso is so good, noone wants to listen to him.
So that brings us around full circle to the point of music, and that is communication, and within communication, you have interrelation. Ode to Joy speaks to everyone, it is perfection because it is SIMPLE. Just like when you type an essay, you are ideally looking for CONCISENESS, not length. Noone goes "oh man, a 1000 page essay on a subject you could explain in a paragraph, you're a genius!!!". I have more respect musically, for someone who doesnt read or write a note of music, being able to put their feelings and words into a song, it may not be a 30 minute symphony, it may only last 3 minutes, and it may not contain every possible key and tempo change, but it communicates. I think Johnny Cash is the perfect example. Theres nothing special about Johnny Cashs guitar playing, and i'd say his singing is sub-par, but as far as his ability to relate to people through his music, he's 2nd to very few.

[Bill Paxton]

Okay, time to play devils advocate.

Beethoven sucks, and heres why(I dont really thing his music "sucks" just bear with me).
He's got hours upon hours in his musical repertoire, some very very brilliant motifs and ideas, most of them built upon breaking "rules" set by the Bach era. And what is he remembered for?
Ode to joy - A total diatonic melody in a major key, a fucking 3rd grader could have wrote it.
There are obviously others that are well known, but the point i'm trying to make here is that sometimes a virtuoso is so good, noone wants to listen to him.
So that brings us around full circle to the point of music, and that is communication, and within communication, you have interrelation. Ode to Joy speaks to everyone, it is perfection because it is SIMPLE. Just like when you type an essay, you are ideally looking for CONCISENESS, not length. Noone goes "oh man, a 1000 page essay on a subject you could explain in a paragraph, you're a genius!!!". I have more respect musically, for someone who doesnt read or write a note of music, being able to put their feelings and words into a song, it may not be a 30 minute symphony, it may only last 3 minutes, and it may not contain every possible key and tempo change, but it communicates. I think Johnny Cash is the perfect example. Theres nothing special about Johnny Cashs guitar playing, and i'd say his singing is sub-par, but as far as his ability to relate to people through his music, he's 2nd to very few.

I agree with Yelram here.

I don't want to sound uncultured, and I respect the genius of the late great composers like Bach and Beethoven, but you'll never find me listening to them. There are a few reasons for that...

While I have some appreciation for technically good music, I feel like there is a huge detachment (for me at least) due to the lack of a human element. This music was written by someone hundreds of years ago and played by other people since. I can go pickup a CD with Beethoven on it, but its essentially just someone covering music he wrote.

When it comes down to it i would prefer to see/hear a musician or musicians play and sing music they wrote. One of my favorite musicians is Chuck Ragan and hes basically just a harmonica, guitar and vocals. The music isn't technically impressive in its own right, but it stirs a lot more in me emmotionally than the london symphony orchestra playing Mozart.

So I think when someone sits back and says something like Mozart sucks, its more or less their own tactless way of saying "I can't relate to this shit".

I don't know about everyone else, but most of my enjoyment in music comes from being able to relate to it. I can't relate to what Beethoven was feeling when he wrote his music. All I can say is "hey, this is a major key its supposed to be happy!" or "hey, this is a minor key its sposed to be sad :( "

I realize this may come off as simplistic but I think the same goes for a lot of art, not just music. I am not going to sit here and say that Michelangelo's David sucks, but at the same time looking at it stirs absolutely nothing in me. However, my roommate drew this unbelievable mural on our wall and I can honestly say i appreciate its beauty every day.

[kid_vidrio]

Isn't that the point? You can recognize the quality but as for your taste, it is predicated on the overall experience.
There is no accounting for taste. The human experience is too diverse.

[Insomniac]

If you've got no established authority, you've got no "objectivity." That's what postmodernism has taught us, yes? Because some people will seriously argue that Jackson Pollack and Andy Warhol are two of the greatest artists of all time and Michelangelo was just a papist propagandist, etc. etc. And they'll be very intelligent people who can back up what they say with technical explanations and an established intelligentsia.

We can agree Shakespeare was good or great, that the Western canon is great, because there was one hierarchical authority saying it was. When feminists and minorities come along and complain that it's just a bunch of old white men writing stuff, that nothing they wrote was really that universal because it didn't apply to the "subjugated experience," or whatever, well then people stop agreeing it was good. (As an aside, Tolstoy hated Billy, didn't he? Not just on taste, but totally.)

What I'm saying is that while some universal truths and appeals to the senses do exist, just like there's some universal reality, almost none of us really touch that. We know the world is round, but not because we've done measurements or calculation. We know it because someone told us in a book and everyone else thinks so. The fact that we got our knowledge this way doesn't make it untrue, but it does invalidate our conclusions somewhat.

[vasili denisov]

I'll take issue with the idea of there being a universal agreement to what is good. I think it's a very tempting idea, but one that has less to do with a love for any work, and more out of a desire for a highest common denominator, an ideal that has transcendent reach.

To note two exceptions, Tolstoy hated Shakespeare, and Nabokov thought Dostoyevsky was a lousy, over-rated writer. Though both writers may have relished having contrarian opinions, they were sincerely felt. Tolstoy was repulsed by Shakespeare's vision of anarchic horror in King Lear. Dostoyevsky was a notoriously poor sentence maker, so that Hemingway, though deeply moved by his work, asks, "How can such a bad writer be so great?" For Nabokov, this poor style isn't something tangential, but a mortal sin, reflecting the shoddy construction of his fictional worlds.
On a metaphysical level, art is the reproduction, by flawed beings, of an imperfect nature which itself imitates a perfect idea.
I think one problem here is what can be considered this perfect idea. The brutal anarchy of King Lear or the nihilism in Caravaggio's paintings could be considered the underlying idea of the universe, and many would consider such an idea repulsive. One could retreat to the point that the technique employed here is very good, yet it's not technique that attracts people to these works, but the vision whole.

So that brings us around full circle to the point of music, and that is communication, and within communication, you have interrelation. Ode to Joy speaks to everyone, it is perfection because it is SIMPLE.
I think you can make the point that Einstein made about the universe, that its laws are complicated, but no more complicated than they should be. Thought that doesn't imply that great books or music are necessarily simple or accessible. Melville's Moby Dick and Joyce's Ulysses are not simple books, but very complicated, messy ones. John Coltrane's My Favourite Things is a less experimental record than Ascension or Sun Ship, and make for easier casual listening. That it's necessarily a better record, I'm not sure.

[WET HOT MESS]

"There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion." - Francis Bacon


I likes dat quote.

[Phil Theehor]

I liked Yelram's point about an elegant simplicity leading to a universal appeal. Vasili's point, though, changed my mind. Messy can be great, too.

Near-term universal appeal does not necessarily signify greatness. Look at Adam Sandler and Will Smith-- both box office titans and who do a handful of things very well. But when you are watching them and appreciating Sandler's schtick or Smith's ridiculous likability, do you get the feeling that are watching peers of Olivier in their prime?

Me neither. But then again, I don't know why I picked Olivier as an example. I think the only movie I've seen with him was Clash of The Titans. Perhaps it is because he has been called a great actor so many times that he has become a universally accepted example of a great actor.

And maybe art achieving greatness simply involves standing the test of time. It could be universal appeal that helps art last, historical impact, or a dozen other factors.

Perhaps it is as simple as this:

Subjective Acclaim x Time = Objective greatness.

(And I think that future generations will both discount Pollack and laugh at those who lauded him).

[}{arlequin]

i find it mildly amusing the effort that people go to try to organize things. or define them. yeah, some stuff is debatable, depending on your tastes, and that's ok. but, when we reach a work of supreme historical or artistic importance, then you had better agree with us or you'll be labeled an ignorant idiot.

the thing is, those big important works... if they truly are so transcendental, i'm not sure they would want to be handled in this way. compartmentalized. treated like some item to be filed away in a box.

secondly, why the need to have it fit some niche? is there a benefit that we gain from having answers to all the questions arch posted?


all that aside, i do agree that a flaw isn't really a flaw. and even if it is, it makes the aesthetic beauty more unique.

[wonderllama]

Firstly, I shuddered when Insomniac said the world was round, at the very least it is an oblate spheroid, but I think Geoid is best. :)

Phil hit the nail on the head however, time is the key to this.

Taking Art for example.
The Australian Aborigines were painting on rockfaces 40,000 years ago in order to tell stories, and indeed Thagg and Gagg were probably doing that on their cave walls in prehistoric times. Today, when we discover any of these artworks, they are appreciated for their archeological value rather than as works of art. Yet I would suspect the people who painted or carved were seen as great story tellers, or for want of a better word, Artists. I'm sure they were revered as artists, but their skills were there for the tribe or clan to see and learn from.

Eventually, most people learned to paint (hey, it's standard fare at 3 year old kindergarten) and so the bar was unintentonally raised. If everyone can paint or draw, how does anyone stand out? Well presumably as brains developed and people evolved, their ability to better appreciate and interpret what they were seeing or imagining allowed their paintings to become more detailed.

Now having said all that, I think Art is a little different in that it has had a VERY long time to develop. I see artwork now that looks like real life. It has reached the point where reality can be reproduced. That's it. Human's strive for perfection, there is it...we can completely clone reality in an artistic sense....and that's why it is different to music, or appreciation of a lady (or man), enjoyment of food or any other aspect where taste is required, because it has reached its natural peak. None of these other things have.

We always strive to find a better tasting burger, we always find a better looking model, as Arch said, we always argue over which bit of music sounds better.

Music is very different as there is no peak to be reached. I'd much rather see Freddie Mercury singing Queen songs than Paul Rodgers or anyone else for that matter, and I feel a bit that way about Classical Music as well. Having played the French Horn in different orchestras, I've had various conductors interpret the same bit of music differently, and they are never the composer. Some even leaving bits out because they thought they were "wrong".

With classical music we are at the mercy of others to interpret what they believe to be correct.

I think I got off track.

[Archetype]

Oh lawd. I don’t know where to even begin.

Fuck it, let’s go to the beginning. Shut up if you've heard this before. The earliest known paintings, discovered in '94, weren’t in Australia, but in France, and date back to roughly 32,000 BCE.

http://randomknowledge.files.wordpress.com/2006/12/500_chauvet.jpg

Far cry from stick figures, eh? Some experts doubt the date because they're so advanced. Hell, when the paintings at Altamira were discovered, most initially assumed they were frauds.

http://100swallows.files.wordpress.com/2008/10/replica-altamira.jpg


Yeah, that's the ceiling. I don't know if it's obvious yet, but these weren't done by singular storytellers, or artists, they were done by full fledged work crews, populated by men and women and even very young children. And they were done with surprisingly sophisticated processes, to the point that in certain places, foundations have been recovered for primitive scaffolding. Why? That's the strange part. Nobody knows. The simplest proposed theory of decoration is more or less bullshit. In the Neolithic town Catal Huyuk, some of the rooms were decorated with bull horns, and most were likely painted depicting hunts. But most, if not all, of the cave paintings, were purely of animals. What's more, is that 72 percent of the animals found at Chauvet weren't even hunted. So why then? Why do we even make art?

One reason for this is that when looking at art as mimesis, perfection is a priori impossible. On a metaphysical level, art is the reproduction, by flawed beings, of an imperfect nature which itself imitates a perfect idea. So those more likely to ignore or prefer what vestigial imperfections there are in a certain great work are eo ipso more likely to prefer it over another...

Looking at art, painting or otherwise, as mimesis is problematic from the getgo. The scientific observation of the Renaissance aside, most art isn't, or at the very least, the purpose is not one of representation. It naturally lends itself to it, but visual language alone changes from culture to culture, person to person, so much, that there has to be significance beyond it. Even to the point that beauty has even been disregarded as a major subject matter over the last 100 years or so.


Now having said all that, I think Art is a little different in that it has had a VERY long time to develop. I see artwork now that looks like real life. It has reached the point where reality can be reproduced. That's it. Human's strive for perfection, there is it...we can completely clone reality in an artistic sense....and that's why it is different to music, or appreciation of a lady (or man), enjoyment of food or any other aspect where taste is required, because it has reached its natural peak. None of these other things have.

The Greeks perfected representation a long, long time ago. The Romans aped it, and the Renaissance aped them. That representation is a common theme, but not the be-all end-all. For instance,

http://i165.photobucket.com/albums/u50/jjmckool/Harry__Ally_Muse_2_1158_103.jpg
http://i165.photobucket.com/albums/u50/jjmckool/artwork_images_76041_188665_harrypa.jpg

Both of these paintings contain elements of representation ingrained in the objects, but they aren't just representations of the physical, but...something else.

Maybe we are still talking about mimesis, but in an entirely different wavelength.

I agree with Yelram here.

I don't want to sound uncultured, and I respect the genius of the late great composers like Bach and Beethoven, but you'll never find me listening to them. There are a few reasons for that...

While I have some appreciation for technically good music, I feel like there is a huge detachment (for me at least) due to the lack of a human element. This music was written by someone hundreds of years ago and played by other people since. I can go pickup a CD with Beethoven on it, but its essentially just someone covering music he wrote.

This was what I was getting into in my original post. Contextually, Beethoven is of and for a different time period, however it's the consumer's job to make the art relevant. In order to appreciate something, anything, fully, you have to kick the habit of passive consumption and suck in that air with the whole of your body, not just the diaphragm and lungs.

With Beethoven, for instance, if you look at his Moonlight Sonata, the composition relies heavily on the person at the piano. Or the guitar, drums, keyboard...

x21por_marcus-miller-moonlight-sonata_music

That one may have been overly obvious, because in purely the piano versions, if you look at the length of a track, the first movement on it's own can vary from 4-12 minutes, completely changing the mood of the track. Even the subtle differences between a couple 6 minuters when found can change the effect of the music.

When it comes down to it i would prefer to see/hear a musician or musicians play and sing music they wrote. One of my favorite musicians is Chuck Ragan and hes basically just a harmonica, guitar and vocals. The music isn't technically impressive in its own right, but it stirs a lot more in me emmotionally than the london symphony orchestra playing Mozart.

So I think when someone sits back and says something like Mozart sucks, its more or less their own tactless way of saying "I can't relate to this shit".

I don't know about everyone else, but most of my enjoyment in music comes from being able to relate to it. I can't relate to what Beethoven was feeling when he wrote his music. All I can say is "hey, this is a major key its supposed to be happy!" or "hey, this is a minor key its sposed to be sad :( "

Personally, I don't care for Mozart or Bach for much the same reason, the emotion is less pronounced. If there at all.

I realize this may come off as simplistic but I think the same goes for a lot of art, not just music. I am not going to sit here and say that Michelangelo's David sucks, but at the same time looking at it stirs absolutely nothing in me. However, my roommate drew this unbelievable mural on our wall and I can honestly say i appreciate its beauty every day.

And therein lies the hell of it all. Art is made not by the time, or the creative genius, or the person sitting there viewing it. It's made by the context. Ulysses is so technically masterful and complex that after putting it down for the last time, I nearly said "fuck reading, nothing else could possibly be compare to this." But it came from a different city, in a different day, from an "irrelevant" man, and it's the artist's job to speak to their time, so even after perfection is reached, it's definition changes by every dimension. Duchamp's fountain may seem silly now, but it was profoundly silly at the time it came to be.

If you've got no established authority, you've got no "objectivity." That's what postmodernism has taught us, yes? Because some people will seriously argue that Jackson Pollack and Andy Warhol are two of the greatest artists of all time and Michelangelo was just a papist propagandist, etc. etc. And they'll be very intelligent people who can back up what they say with technical explanations and an established intelligentsia.

Raphael would be a better example than Michelangelo, from what I read, Mikey was more along the lines of a William Blake, only that he was heavily revered instead of politely ignored. And, as much as I hate Modernism, those people would have a point. Jackson Pollack on his own was not particularly good. By any standards, he sucked. But he will be revered in a hundred years as much as any, because he helped to loosen the grip of the past, paradoxically.

If anybody wants a good, concise treatise on modernism, try a little Greenberg (http://www.sharecom.ca/greenberg/modernism.html). Warning, it's apparently not the easiest read, but it's damned good if you understand it. And yeah, I stole it from one of my classes.

[Archangel]

First, thanks for participating, guys. I really really like the way this little discussion is working out.

If you've got no established authority, you've got no "objectivity." That's what postmodernism has taught us, yes? Because some people will seriously argue that Jackson Pollack and Andy Warhol are two of the greatest artists of all time and Michelangelo was just a papist propagandist, etc. etc. And they'll be very intelligent people who can back up what they say with technical explanations and an established intelligentsia.

We can agree Shakespeare was good or great, that the Western canon is great, because there was one hierarchical authority saying it was. When feminists and minorities come along and complain that it's just a bunch of old white men writing stuff, that nothing they wrote was really that universal because it didn't apply to the "subjugated experience," or whatever, well then people stop agreeing it was good. (As an aside, Tolstoy hated Billy, didn't he? Not just on taste, but totally.)

Yeah, I noticed that I didn't get into the topic of agenda enough in the OP, and I apologise. Personally, I object to the notion that people who put agenda first are ever "very intelligent", because, as you put it, they tend to analyse things according to only one priority. This is my principal beef with all the different -isms of the last century and a half regarding art: I think it's incredibly petty to look at a great work of art through only one facet of the entire human experience. If people would write to satisfy feminists, nothing great would ever be written, yet every -ist demands that their criteria be fulfilled, lest the work in question be called worthless.

Fuck you. Seriously.

I still contend that the truly great divides people into those who are able to appreciate it and those who don't. Notice how I say appreciate, not like.

That's not to say that art itself cannot be touched by agenda. But - and this is an entirely subjective criterion here - maybe, whatever Dante was trying to achieve was a little... greater than what Luce Irigaray wants literature to be. Art reached for a theory of everything way before physicists ever thought of its existence.

What I'm saying is that while some universal truths and appeals to the senses do exist, just like there's some universal reality, almost none of us really touch that. We know the world is round, but not because we've done measurements or calculation. We know it because someone told us in a book and everyone else thinks so. The fact that we got our knowledge this way doesn't make it untrue, but it does invalidate our conclusions somewhat.

It was Nietzsche who said that a literary critic had to be a poet himself, that if the critique wasn't literature in its own right, it was basically worthless. Since hardly any of us are artists, then, we are too dependent on the insights of others. As I alluded to before, once a canon is established, people will agree to it not out of conviction, but out of fear of appearing stupid...

I mean, somehow I doubt that those bitches showing off their gowns at the Scala's annual season opener actually care about Verdi...

I'll take issue with the idea of there being a universal agreement to what is good. I think it's a very tempting idea, but one that has less to do with a love for any work, and more out of a desire for a highest common denominator, an ideal that has transcendent reach.

So what are you saying, that it's all is a convention which, by decree or consensus, desperately tries to establish something as canon because... we need one?

To note two exceptions, Tolstoy hated Shakespeare, and Nabokov thought Dostoyevsky was a lousy, over-rated writer. Though both writers may have relished having contrarian opinions, they were sincerely felt. Tolstoy was repulsed by Shakespeare's vision of anarchic horror in King Lear. Dostoyevsky was a notoriously poor sentence maker, so that Hemingway, though deeply moved by his work, asks, "How can such a bad writer be so great?" For Nabokov, this poor style isn't something tangential, but a mortal sin, reflecting the shoddy construction of his fictional worlds.

But they cared about them, didn't they? Hatred is a form of appreciation, as well: Me, personally, I fucking hate Thomas Mann. It bloody enrages me that somebody with such a masterful command of the German language abuses it to write 1,000 pages about essentially nothing at all. After just three pages of The Magic Mountain, I feel a physical need to read some Kafka, to keep myself from shooting something. But there are certain people who love just that about works like The Magic Mountain: I don't understand it, but to each his own (which is the whole point of this, I guess)...

Kleist may just be my favourite writer, but every time the Prussian officer overrides the poet, I just want to slap some sense into that guy. I'm guessing Tchaikovsky isn't too popular in France, when it comes to that.

Oh, and Shakespeare lived in a period and region of (comparable) peace, stability and wealth: To him, anarchy was a haunting, lingering spectre, a bête noire, yet something he wasn't intimately familiar with, having been born after the Bloody Mary years: I love how in Julius Caesar, he sided with neither Brutus nor Anthony, how he presented civil war as the only real evil. Tolstoy, on the other hand, saw war first-hand; obviously, the detached (but nonetheless atrociously accurate) theorising of horror must have been rather hard on him.

I think one problem here is what can be considered this perfect idea. The brutal anarchy of King Lear or the nihilism in Caravaggio's paintings could be considered the underlying idea of the universe, and many would consider such an idea repulsive. One could retreat to the point that the technique employed here is very good, yet it's not technique that attracts people to these works, but the vision whole.

I don't think that that clashes with what I said. I think every great work offers us a glimpse of the Truth; but that's all it is, a small glimpse, shot through the prism of somebody else's observations, thoughts, feelings. And why shouldn't every facet of the human experience be contained in that Truth, since all we can know about it (or should care about) is how that Truth relates to us, anyway? And isn't the human capacity for terror or nihilism an essential aspect of it?

I never said that the universal would be positive; I feel near shattered by Leopardi's analysis of it, but I cannot ignore it, un-glimpse what it has made me witness...

I think you can make the point that Einstein made about the universe, that its laws are complicated, but no more complicated than they should be. Thought that doesn't imply that great books or music are necessarily simple or accessible. Melville's Moby Dick and Joyce's Ulysses are not simple books, but very complicated, messy ones. John Coltrane's My Favourite Things is a less experimental record than Ascension or Sun Ship, and make for easier casual listening. That it's necessarily a better record, I'm not sure.

I always keep coming back to Dante. Everybody has read the Inferno and appreciates it because its message is so straightforward, yet few people even approach the hugely complex cosmology of the Paradiso.

[vasili denisov]

So what are you saying, that it's all is a convention which, by decree or consensus, desperately tries to establish something as canon because... we need one?
It's a bit of a distraction, and I didn't put too much thought to it. I think there's a place reserved now, especially in increasingly secular societies, for some aesthetic work that can be considered sacred and transcendental, that derives from the need for that work, rather than the aesthetic virtues of the work itself. I think there's a wide gap between the ubiquity of Shakespeare's image and appreciation of his plays. That's not to say that I think he's a lousy writer; or that this should be mistaken for the pretentiousness of citing someone to put on airs.

Maybe the best way of putting it, would be that when reading an Orwell essay, he makes the casual remark that at some point even Shakespeare would be forgotten. I won't argue the point; but the concept of some music or literature, shared between us and our ancestors, disappearing, that whoever comes after would find us more nameless and faceless because of that absence, or because the musical or literary forms had become utterly inscrutable except to a few scholars, left me chill.

But they cared about them, didn't they? Hatred is a form of appreciation, as well: Me, personally, I fucking hate Thomas Mann. It bloody enrages me that somebody with such a masterful command of the German language abuses it to write 1,000 pages about essentially nothing at all. After just three pages of The Magic Mountain, I feel a physical need to read some Kafka, to keep myself from shooting something. But there are certain people who love just that about works like The Magic Mountain: I don't understand it, but to each his own (which is the whole point of this, I guess)...
It's difficult for me to put a needle on whether Tolstoy's attitude is passionately angry or contemptful towards Shakespeare. Of what I remember, I'd say he's dismissive. He thinks he's a lousy writer, that the original plays he's working from are better than what he comes up with. I've mentioned the chaos in Shakespeare's Lear disturbs him, but this is somewhat of an inference. Both AN Wilson and George Orwell try and read this for motive, and offer some guesses, though these are guesses, one of which has stayed with me, the utter disorder of Shakespeare's universe, which is a stark contrast to Tolstoy's belief in an underlying christian principle.

Oh, and Shakespeare lived in a period and region of (comparable) peace, stability and wealth: To him, anarchy was a haunting, lingering spectre, a bête noire, yet something he wasn't intimately familiar with, having been born after the Bloody Mary years: I love how in Julius Caesar, he sided with neither Brutus nor Anthony, how he presented civil war as the only real evil. Tolstoy, on the other hand, saw war first-hand; obviously, the detached (but nonetheless atrociously accurate) theorising of horror must have been rather hard on him.
I think if Shakespeare had lived later, this might have more truth to it, the way DH Lawrence becomes beguiled by paganism and leaves behind christian and marxist order in his journeys. But Shakespeare lived in a very disturbing time and place. London was ravaged by plague, England still rife with sectarianism. Shakespeare had catholics in his family, and had acquaintance with catholics who were tried and executed for their faith. London was a perpetually young city, because people died so early. Shakespeare, in his life, clung practically to order as a writer favoured by the Queen's court. His work isn't a romantic vision, or one to sate nihilist tastes, but of someone having great difficulty making sense of brutal absurdity.

Tolstoy, on the other hand, did have service in the Crimean war, though I believe he emerged relatively unaffected by it. He spent most of his life in wealthy, easy self-imposed exile on his estate, away from the noise and ruckus of the russian cities. Again, however, I've premised that Tolstoy's distate of Shakespeare was somehow philosophical, rather than some aesthetic quirk that many share.

[kid_vidrio]

Subjective Acclaim x Time = Objective greatness.

Isn't 'greatness' a little subjective in itself? I'd say objective greatness is an oxymoron.
I like the idea of simplifying the conversation to a formula though.

[Archangel]

Well, I stand corrected. Serves me right for not double-checking.

I think if Shakespeare had lived later, this might have more truth to it, the way DH Lawrence becomes beguiled by paganism and leaves behind christian and marxist order in his journeys. But Shakespeare lived in a very disturbing time and place. London was ravaged by plague, England still rife with sectarianism. Shakespeare had catholics in his family, and had acquaintance with catholics who were tried and executed for their faith. London was a perpetually young city, because people died so early. Shakespeare, in his life, clung practically to order as a writer favoured by the Queen's court. His work isn't a romantic vision, or one to sate nihilist tastes, but of someone having great difficulty making sense of brutal absurdity.

Hence, the word "comparative".

I don't think there is any artist in Europe until Louis XIV's France who really knew tranquility. Obviously there was religious prosecution, disease (especially typhoid, obviously), early death and chaos even in his day, and some of it does shine through in his works, but those problems were the order of the day back then, weren't they? Epistemologically speaking, that's like somebody in the future talking about the pollution some artists in New York City experienced in our time; form their perspective, it might be horrid, but it's not like it's much different from Paris 40 years earlier.

The difference was the prosperity of Elizabethan Britain, its safety from outside invasion (at least after '88; if I'm not mistaken, his literary work starts in '90 or thereabouts), and after that, also relative stability; very little of which applied to the Continent - especially Germany and Italy - where civil war and conflicts of succession were as common as indulgence and the burning of heretics. Compared to our sheltered, nay, coddled lives today, Elizabethan London may seem more suited to the banks of Styx than those of the Thames; but I'm guessing that back then, half of Saxony or Naples would have given their left arm to live there. Hell, even Florence and Milan were on their way down by then.

I never said that Shakepeare's work was a romantic vision; but I, at least, believe to see in it a clinging to stability, obviously born of the awareness of the horrors which chaos brings, that an unjust ruler is better than none at all.

Tolstoy, on the other hand, did have service in the Crimean war, though I believe he emerged relatively unaffected by it. He spent most of his life in wealthy, easy self-imposed exile on his estate, away from the noise and ruckus of the russian cities. Again, however, I've premised that Tolstoy's distate of Shakespeare was somehow philosophical, rather than some aesthetic quirk that many share.

That's quite possible, and as I said, I have to defer to you there, since my take on it was just conjecture. It's just that I've read Tolstoy's accounts of the siege of Sevastopol as a child, and they seemed far too vivid to be written by someone not affected by the events...

[Phil Theehor]

Isn't 'greatness' a little subjective in itself? I'd say objective greatness is an oxymoron.
I like the idea of simplifying the conversation to a formula though.

Yes. Of course. My oversimplification was an attempt to approximate they way art becomes generally regarded at great.

"Consenus" should probably replace "Objective" in the formula.

[Archangel]

I think we should indeed focus on the consensus here, and the development of canon.

[wonderllama]

And will our consensus then be called the Gorilla Mask Taste Theory?
It needs a catchy name...unlike the one I just suggested.

[}{arlequin]

I think we should indeed focus on the consensus here, and the development of canon.
and this is precisely my point. why? why *must* there be a canon? to what ends? what is the purpose of creating yet another category? just so it can be easily identified?

[Archetype]

And will our consensus then be called the Gorilla Mask Taste Theory?
It needs a catchy name...unlike the one I just suggested.
Gorilla Masque Theory?

[Archangel]

and this is precisely my point. why? why *must* there be a canon? to what ends? what is the purpose of creating yet another category? just so it can be easily identified?

It would also be interesting to analyse the fluidity of canon, how somebody highly celebrated in his own age fades into total obscurity, and how people totally neglected by their contemporaries become part of canon hundreds of years later...