Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Merlion" data-source="post: 3122504" data-attributes="member: 10397">Recent discussion about the book "Eragon" and its quality, or lack thereof have gotten me thinking about some things, and I'd like to start a general conversation about those things.  Basically what sparked me off is this. On this site, and in critics reviews and various other places I frequently see people doing what I think of as "slamming", degrading, or belittling books, movies, music, whatever. Not just expressing their opinion, or offering specific criticisms, but statements like "it sucks", "its crap", "its really bad" etc. I have two problems with these statements. One, to me they sound like turning opinion into fact. Two, especially the more major ones sound to me as though the person saying them is claiming that the work in question is completely worthless and without value, which brings me to my major point.I dont believe any creative work is without some basic value. Writting a book, painting a painting, making a movie or composing a piece of music all require thought and effort, and general the person puts a good deal of emotion into its creation as well. To me, this imbues the work with a basic value that is independant of anyone's opinion of it, or any set of criteria applied to it.I tend to feel that art and creativity are subjective, and so aside from this intrinsic value due to the thought and effort put into them, its not really possible to call a work "bad" in any objective way, or try to come up with hard and fast criteria of "quality" for creative works, because the nature, and primary purposes of creative works are ephemeral and subjective in nature, and hard to prove or disprove. Now many disagree with me, on one or both of these points, believing that their are objective standards of "quality" even in subjective works and/or that some works despite the effort put into them, still have no value.I find this very hard to understand, so I am looking for a general discussion of these ideas, and in particular to try and understand how and why some hold these particular views.Another thing I have noticed is people often leveling heavy criticisms at books, stories and movies for being derivative or unoriginal, even some times using this as a basis to claim the work is objectively "bad". Now again, everyone's opinion is valid and they should express it...however I'm not sure I understand why people become so negative toward a work about this issue. Mainly because as near as I can tell, most art forms that involving storytelling directly...mainly literature and movies, are generally at least somewhat derivative especially in the area of plot. I mean the farmboy who turns out to have hidden powers or a special ancestry and is then taken on adventrues by a wise mentor type has been used many times for ages in many forms and genres. I'm not sure there is really such a thing as an original plot. I find that just about the only way to find stories that bear little resemblence to anything that has gone before, is to go into more avante garde forms...stories that often have little or no plot, or that tend to throw many of the usual storytelling aproaches out the window.For these reasons, I dont really see "lack of originality" as being a particularly good criteria to determine that a work is "bad"</blockquote>

Verification