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Message: <blockquote data-quote="takyris" data-source="post: 3126271" data-attributes="member: 5171">Excellent point, Marlowe. I think what bugged me about some of Merlion's earlier points is that he was saying, "It's all subjective!" with the same finality that, for example, science-doubters say, "But evolution is just a THEORY, not a fact!" Regardless of whether you believe in evolution or not (and I'm not touching that, because it is unfortunately political), that's a silly argument for them to make, because it misunderstands, through malice or ignorance, what "theory" means in the scientific community.So yes, you can say that all art is subjective, and you're technically right, but you're ignoring, through malice or ignorance, the accumulated data and standards that people have generated on the subject."Red" is also subjective, because nobody can say for certain exactly what someone else is seeing, and nobody can describe the color red except in their own terms. Even though you can measure the wavelengths, you cannot say for certain exactly what reaction is happening the brain of an individual when he looks at a red object -- what he sees.There's also room for different opinions -- I might say that something is brick-red, while Hypersmurf sees it as burgundy and Umbran thinks it's maroon, and we all have slightly different definitions for what those words are and will likely never be able to agree on anything more specific than "Kind of a dark red".But if my two-year-old son looks at a red rocking horse, and I ask him "What color is the horse?" and he says, "Green!", that is not a subject up for debate. That is not a difference of interpretation. That is my son either getting his colors mixed up or suffering from red-green color blindness.What I argued, the argument that I suspect led in part to you starting this thread, Merlion, is not that one can objectively prove brick-red versus burgundy versus maroon. What I argued was that we can objectively tell the difference between red and green, if we've studied our colors. If you don't care about studying colors, that's fine -- there's no reason that everybody has to study colors, and if studying colors means that you have to learn about peuce and mauve and other unpleasant colors that didn't bother you before because you didn't see them as any different from green, well, sometimes that's a bummer. (No insult intended to people who really like peuce and mauve.)However, based on the page you list as your homepage in your user profile, you are trying to get your writing published professionally. If that is the case (I'm basing this on the line in which you say that you aren't posting some stories on Elfwood because "some of them I wish to try and publish", so pardon me if I've misunderstood the context of that line), then I'd think that expanding your knowledge of colors would be a helpful and good thing. You can, in fact, paint without knowing the difference between red and green, and some experimental artists do that sort of thing on purpose, but for the vast majority of painters, knowing your colors is a good thing. By the same token, most writers who want to be published professionally benefit from learning the craft of writing as well as the art of writing.</blockquote>

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