Ankh-Morpork Guard said:
There are objective qualities in most art that can be judged as 'good' or 'bad'. These are from hundreds of years of the art form developing, and whether you agree with them or not...they exist. Its from an academic end of things, which I know not all people like, but that doesn't change the fact of its existence.
That is not strictly true. Academia (and I know this because I'm an academic
) works on the basis of consensus. And that includes the arts. What constitutes a great work of art in academia? (Or, unfortunately in some cases, a great work of science?) Nothing more or less is required than that a lot of academics cite or write about it to the point where that work must be included in the "canon" of that field.
So... it's essentially a mildly informed version of a popularity contest. Nothing more. And, in the sciences at least, it's severely polluted by the fact that certain kinds of work are "sexier" and easier to get published or even funded in the first place. And the people making the decisions about funding (and sometimes even the publishing) are not necessarily even informed. I would argue that the art side of the equation is similarly polluted nowadays, but I'm not an artist, so I can't speak with authority in that area.
Speaking of speaking with authority...
Clavis said:
Recent research indicate a real brain difference between those who self-identify as Conservative and those who declare themselves to be Liberal.
I wouldn't touch that one with a 10-foot pole, personally. There were methodological problems to say the least, and I'll eat my first two diplomas if it replicates. And I'll eat all of them if it replicates outside an undergraduate population. But then, almost nothing in social psychology replicates correctly outside an undergraduate population these days.
Back to the issue at hand....
Really, the only rigorously applied means of determining what is art amounts to a popularity contest. In the end, despite being in such a field (or perhaps because of it), I'm not a fan of this method. As such, I'm a proponent of a simpler methodology. Does it communicate something to you?
We can talk about art as communication and all that jazz, but communication requires a sender AND a receiver. So, IMO, the creation of a piece of art is NOT the point. It is the experience of it that defines it as art. "Was something communicated between the creator and myself?"
In other words, the work of the painter's craft called "the Mona Lisa" is a masterpiece of art IF you find it affecting. I'm one of those people who finds her facial expression enigmatic, and slightly mesmerizing. My mind can create 10,000 viable reasons for that facial expression, and I get lost in the sea of them. As a result, for me, it's a piece of ART. For my wife, who is actually a more artistically-trained person than I will ever be, the Mona Lisa is naught but a fine example of craftsmanship. The skill of a master artisan is there in the craft, but it fails for her to cause any thought or emotion what-so-ever about anything. For her, it's simply a somewhat unattractive woman. A well-crafted representation of one, to be sure, but an empty one.
Does that make it art? Not to her. And the fact that it has been in the canon for ever and ever is not germane to the question. No amount of academic or popular agreement on the subject of the Mona Lisa is going to make someone who is unaffected by it suddenly see something there.
Similarly, if watching an episode of Spongebob causes someone to think deep thoughts on the nature of brotherhood (or whatever), then it succeeded as a piece of art for them, and while I might find nothing there, I recognize that different people have different intellectual and emotional triggers and different needs. And that makes it a more interesting world, whereas uniformity in this regard would only bore me to tears in the end, even if I got to be smugly self-righteous in the vindication of my choice of Coke over Pepsi for a while.
